"Well, why not? When the princess tours the provinces it is customary to present historical pageants in her honor. This drama is your due." And as he spoke he observed for the first time the absence of the ring from her significant finger. The shock threw him into a moment's swift surmise, and when he looked up at her she was flushed and uneasy. She recovered herself first, and though her hand remained on the table it had the tremulous action of a frightened small animal—observed yet daring not to seek cover.
"I hope this council to-night will not fail. I am eager to see what you will do with them," she hastened to say.
"They will come!" he replied.
Calvin was relating a story of a mountain-lion he had once treed for an Eastern artist to photograph.
"Just then the dern brute jumped right plum onto the feller and knocked him down, machine and all; for a minute or two it was just a mixture o' man and lion, then that feller come up top, and the next thing I seen he batted the lion with his box, and that kind o' stunted the brute, and he hit him again and glass began to fly; he was game all right, that feller was. When the lion stiffened out, he turned to where I was a-rollin' on the pine-needles, and says, quiet-like, 'Give me your revolver, please.' I give it to him, and he put it to the lion's ear and finished him. When he got up and looked at his machine he says, 'How much is a mountain-lion skin worth?' ''Bout four dollars, green,' I says. He looked at the inwards of his box, which was scattered all over the ground. Says he, 'You wouldn't call that profitable, would you—a seventy-dollar instrument in exchange for a four-dollar pelt?'"
Everybody laughed at this story, and the dinner came to an end with the sheriff in excellent temper. Lawson offered cigars, and tolled him across the road to the office, leaving Curtis alone in his library.
He resolutely set to work to present the situation of the sheriff's presence concisely to the department in a telegram, and was still at work upon this when Jennie entered the room, closed the curtains, and lit the lamp.
Elsie came in a little later to say, sympathetically:
"Are you tired, Captain Curtis?"
He pushed his writing away.