"Do you—" began the boy excitedly, "do you ride a white mare?"
This time it was the doctor's wife who colored. She flushed to the roots of her hair.
"Yes," she answered hurriedly, and went on to explain the early conditions of the forest. But Wilbur was not listening, he was remembering the stories that he had heard since his arrival into the forest of the "little white lady," of whom the ranchers and miners always spoke so reverently. But presently Rifle-Eye's name attracted his attention and he listened again.
"We were camping," she said, "in one of the redwood groves not far from San Francisco for the summer, the doctor having been appointed an attending surgeon at one of the larger hospitals, although he was very young. We had been married only a little over a year. One evening just after supper, Rifle-Eye, although we did not know him then, walked into camp.
"'You are a doctor, an operating doctor?' he inquired.
"'Yes,' my husband replied, 'I am a surgeon.'
"Then the old hunter came to where I was standing.
"'You are a doctor's wife?' he queried. You know that direct way of his?"
"Indeed I do," Wilbur replied. "It's one you've got to answer."
"So I said, 'Yes, I am a doctor's wife,' just as if I was a little girl answering a catechism.