"Just as if you would not! And Lieutenant Murray would come in for the worse medicine and the biggest doses."
"If his constitution is equal to his impudence, it would take stupendous doses to have any effect. I wish he could be sent back to the Fort."
"Won't sending him up among the Indians do just as well?"
"Y-yes. Are you going to, papa?"
"Ah! now you grow inquisitive."
"I do think," said Tillie, "you all plague her a great deal."
"They just treat me as if I was a joke instead of a girl," complained Fred. "They began it before I was born by giving me a boy's name, and it's been kept up ever-since."
"Never mind, Baby," he said soothingly; "if I had not made a boy of you I could not have had you with me, so the cause was vital."
They both laughed, but it was easy to see that the cause was vital to them, and their companionship very much of a necessity. Its interruptions since her babyhood had been few and short, and her education, picked up on the frontier, had taught her that in the world there was just one place for her—in the saddle, and beside her father, just as her mother had ridden beside him before Fred was born.