"SHE'S MY GIRL!"

THE WESTERNERS

By

Stewart Edward White

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP

Copyright, 1900 and 1901, by
STEWART EDWARD WHITE
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[ "SHE'S MY GIRL!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece ]

[ A SIOUX COUNCIL ]

[ THAT BABY CRY, "MAMA!" ]

[ "COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..." ]

[ "WATCH ME HIT THAT SQUIRREL!" ]

[ JIM PUT UP A GOOD FIGHT. ]

[ "ARE YOU STILL MAD?" ]

[ "MY LITTLE MOLLY," HE CHOKED. ]

I

THE HALF-BREED

A tourist of to-day, peering from the window of his vestibule train at the electric-lit vision of Three Rivers, as it stars the banks of the Missouri like a constellation against the blackness of the night, would never recognize, in the trim little modern town, the old Three Rivers of the early seventies.

To restore the latter, he should first of all sweep the ground bare of the buildings which now adorn it, leaving, perhaps, here and there an isolated old shanty of boards far advanced toward dissolution. He would be called upon to substitute, in place of the brick stores and dwellings of to-day, a motley collection of lean-tos, dug-outs, tents, and shacks, scattered broadcast over the virgin prairie without the slightest semblance of order. Where the Oriole furniture factory now stands, he must be prepared to see—and hear—a great drove of horses and oxen feeding on bottom-land grass. And for the latter-day citizens, whose police record is so discouraging to the ambitious chief, and so creditable to themselves, he must imagine a multitude more heterogeneous, perhaps, than could be gathered anywhere else in the world—tenderfeet from the East; mountaineers from Tennessee and Kentucky, bearing their historic long pea rifles; soft-voiced Virginians; keen, alert woodsmen from the North; wiry, silent trappers and scouts from the West; and here and there a straight Indian, stalking solemnly toward some one of the numerous "whiskey joints." The court-house site he would find crowded with canvas wagons, noisy with the shrill calling of women and children. Where Judge Oglethorpe has recently erected his stone mansion, Frank Byers would be running a well-patronized saloon. Were he to complete the picture by placing himself mentally at the exact period of our story's opening, he would find the whole town, if such it might be called, seething, turbulent, eager, and—it must be confessed—ready for trouble.

For all these varied swarms had gathered from three points of the compass for the purpose of pushing on to the gold discoveries of the Black Hills. They had rushed eagerly to this extremest point—and stopped. As far as the border of the great wilderness it was possible to journey individually; beyond that mysterious boundary nothing could be accomplished alone. Trained scouts and plainsmen there became necessary, and these skilled men declined to attempt the journey.

Their reasons were simple and cogent. Throughout all of the previous winter unusual snows had covered the pasturage to such a depth that much of the range stock, on which the plainsman relied to draw his heavy "schooners," had died of cold and exhaustion, while of the survivors but an insignificant remnant was fit to travel. After causing this damage, the snow had melted in four days, leaving the streams swollen, and the trails in an awful state, especially in the Bad Lands, where, in the deeper gullies, they must have been quite washed out. As an incidental climax, piled on top to make good measure, the Ogallalas were on the war-path; and of all the Sioux the Ogallalas are the worst.

Nobody gave a thought to the Ogallalas. That was part of the game. But a blind man could see that those emaciated cattle couldn't stand the racket. And so Three Rivers steadily congested, and the conditions of life daily became more exacting.

One of the many who had reached the frontier town, only to find himself checked in his desire to push ahead, was a young man of twenty-two or three. He had made a long journey, and he was correspondingly disappointed when he foresaw, as his immediate prospect, a summer's sojourn in a sun-baked, turbulent, unprofitable region. Not that he was content with a superficial proof of its necessity. He sought the preventing causes at the very sources of them: he examined the cattle carefully; he questioned closely the men who knew the trails, the fords, the Indians. When he had quite finished his patient investigations, he swore briefly and gustily, and then went on a three-days' spree, from which he sobered into a quiet cigarette-smoking lounger, waiting for what might turn up. Nothing did.

The days followed one another until a month had passed, which seemed as long as a year. Men gambled away one another's small store of wealth, drank away their own disappointments, shot each other's lives out unmolested. Three spasmodic vigilance committees hanged six men by the neck until they were dead, but speedily allowed themselves to dissolve and the town to relapse, because of a happy combination of sheer laziness and sympathy with the offenders.

Rumors of an advance flew thick. They were always brought heavily to earth by a charge of common-sense or investigation. Nevertheless, others were speedily on the wing; and men looked at them. Ensuing disappointment came in time to possess a cumulative force that amounted to a dull, sullen anger against nothing in particular.

The young man of whom mention has already been made, took his month with an outward seeming of imperturbability, but with an increasing inner tension. He was a tall, dark, straight young man, broad-shouldered and clean built; strong, but with fine hands and feet. His hair was straight and black; his features clean-cut and swarthy. By his restless eye and a certain indefinable cast of expression you knew him for a half-breed. He gave out his name as Michaïl Lafond, and he lived much in himself. Toward the close of the troublous thirty days, a practised observer might have noticed that his slender fingers were rarely still. Otherwise the half-breed appeared the most indifferent member of the community.

His apparent idleness did not prevent him from investigating in his painstaking manner each rumor as it took form. This was the reason why, when finally the formation of a genuine train was undertaken by three of the specialists known as scouts, Michaïl Lafond was one of the earliest to know of it, and one of the first to apply for admission. He owned four strong little horses of mustang stock, and a light, two-wheeled wagon of the bob-tailed type. Most of his life had been spent in the great Northern wilderness. He was expert in his own kind of woodcraft, accustomed to hardships, and a good shot. In every respect he knew himself fitted to become a member of such an expedition as the present. He had no doubt of his acceptance. When he realized that at last his waiting was ended, he saddled one of his horses, and rode three miles out on the lonely prairie, where he jumped up and down, shook his fists in the air, and screamed with delight. This was the half-breed of it. Impassibility may be stupid or intensely nervous. Then, all a-tremble, he rode back to where the three specialists in question were camped, just on the border of the town, and proffered his formal application.

The three to whom he addressed himself were practically at the head of their profession. It was not a profession of easy access, but one to which only a long and dangerous apprenticeship gave admittance. Its members were men who had lived their lives on the frontier, either as express riders, hunters, trappers, army scouts, or as members of the Indian tribes themselves. They were a hardy, bold, self-reliant race, equal to all emergencies, and exacting from the men in their charge the most implicit obedience. To their wonderful resourcefulness is due the fact that so many comparatively weak forces were enabled to penetrate in safety a hostile country teeming with the most treacherous and wily foes.

As with all crafts, they had their big men—the masters, as it were—whose deeds they emulated, whose feats of skill and divination they spoke of with awe, whose names they worshipped. Of such were Kit Carson, Wild Bill, Jim Clarke, Buffalo Bill, Slade, and the three men with whom we have to deal—Jim Buckley, Alfred, and Billy Knapp.

Billy Knapp was dark, tall, broad-shouldered, long-haired, wearing a bristly mustache and goatee. A stranger might have remarked his frowning, beetling brow with a little uneasiness, but would have taken heart from the energetic kindliness of the eyes beneath. In fact, eager, autocratic energy was the dominant note in Billy's character. He succeeded because this energy carried him through—with some to spare.

Jim Buckley was also tall and large, but he gave one less the idea of nervous force than of a certain static power. He was a mass which moved slowly but irresistibly. His seal-brown beard, his broad forehead, the distance between his wide, steady eyes strengthened this impression. One felt that his decisions would be hardly come at, but stubbornly held. Success was inevitable, but it would be the result of slow thinking, deep purpose, and a quiet tenacity of grip that never let go.

As for Alfred—everybody has heard of him. His place in the annals of the West is assured, and his peculiarities of person and character have been many times described. Surely no one is unfamiliar with his short, bandy legs, his narrow, sloping little shoulders, his contracted chest, his queer pink and white face, with its bashful smile, his high bald head. Everybody knows his fear of women. Everybody knows, too, that he never had an opinion of his own on any subject. His speciality was making the best of other people's, no matter how bad they were; and competent judges say he could accomplish a more gloriously perfect best out of some tenderfoot's fool notion than another man with the advice of experts. Some people even maintain that Alfred was the best scout the plains ever produced, only he was so bashful that it took an expert to appreciate the fact.

When Lafond approached the camp of these men and threw himself from his pony, he found only Jim Buckley, sitting in the shade of one of his wagons, smoking his pipe.

"One says that you will tak' train through thees summer," began the half-breed abruptly. "Ah lak' to go also."

Buckley looked his interlocutor over keenly.

"Yes," said he slowly, between puffs. "That's right. We aims to pull through, but we don't aim to take no lumber with us. You married?"

Lafond shook his head. "No! No! No!" he cried vehemently.

"That's all right. Got any cattle?"

"Four horses."

"That one of them?"

"Yes."

The scout arose, still with the same appearance of deliberation, and inspected the pony thoroughly, with the eye and movements of an expert.

"Others as good?" he inquired.

"Bettaire," assured Lafond.

"Wagon?" pursued the laconic Buckley.

"Bobtail," responded Lafond with equal brevity. Though young, he already possessed some shrewdness in the reading of character.

Buckley sat down in the shade and relit his pipe.

"Where are you from?" he asked bluntly.

"Ontario."

"Woods?"

"Yes."

"Thought you wasn't no tenderfoot. Ever hit the trail?"

"Not on those plains. In the woods many times."

"We ain't takin' but damn few," went on Buckley dissertatively, "and them that goes has to be right on to their job. No women; good cattle. That's our motto. Reckon you-all fills the bill. Cyan't tell. Got to ask the others."

Lafond knew that this, from a man of Buckley's stamp, was distinct encouragement. At the moment, the other two members came up. Buckley, in a few words, told them of the newcomer's desires and qualifications.

Billy looked him over briefly.

"Yo're a breed, ain't yo'?" he inquired with refreshing directness. "I thought so." He turned to Buckley, with the air of ignoring Lafond altogether. "That bars him," he said, with a little laugh.

"He's got a mighty good line of broncs," Buckley objected.

"Don't care if his hosses are good," stated Billy decidedly. "He's a breed, an' that's enough. I seen plenty of that crew, and I ain't goin' to have one in the same country with me, if I can help it, let alone the same outfit."

He began to whistle and rummage in the back of the wagon, with a charming obliviousness to the presence of the subject of his remarks.

"That settles it," said Buckley, curtly and indifferently.

The half-breed, his nervous hands deep in his side-pockets, walked slowly to his horse. Then, in sudden access of rapid motion, he leaped on the animal's back and disappeared.

II

THE WOMAN

Barely had the dust of the half-breed's sudden departure sifted from the air, when Buckley arose and announced his intention of "taking a little look round." He was gone two hours, and returned looking solemn and earnest. Billy and Alfred were cooking things over a small fire. Buckley spat in a propitiatory manner toward seven small bushes, and conversationally informed the northwest corner of the canvas top on a nearby schooner that he, Jim Buckley, had decided to take along a woman.

Billy and Alfred thereupon spilled the coffee, and could not believe their ears.

"She's goin', if I have to take her by myself," Buckley concluded. And then Alfred and Billy looked up into his face, and saw that he was in earnest.

Alfred turned pink and wriggled the bacon, trying immediately to think how he was going to make the best of this. It did not look easy.

Billy Knapp exploded.

"You go to hell!" was his method of objection.

"She goes," repeated Jim, with even greater quietness of manner. "An' if you-all don' like it, why, jest say so. I quits. You got to have her, if you have me."

"I'd jest like to know why," complained Billy, a little sobered at this threat.

Whereupon Jim found himself utterly at a loss. He had not thought as far as that. He suddenly appreciated the logical weakness of his position; but then, again, intuitively, he realized more subtly its strength. So he said not a word, but arose lightly, and brought unto them the woman herself.

She was a sweet little woman, with deep, trusting blue eyes, and she accompanied Jim without a thought of the opposition she had excited. Jim merely told her she was to meet the other two men. She intended only to show her appreciation of their kindness.

She approached the fire, and assumed her most gracious manner.

"I want to thank you both, as well as Mr. Buckley, for being so good to me," she began, with real feeling. "I know how hard it is for you to take me just now, and I appreciate it more than I can say. I don't know what we would have done. You need not be afraid that we shall be much trouble, for we will all be brave, and not murmur. Your goodness has made me very happy, and I am going to pray to God for you to-night," said the little Puritan with simple reverence. It meant a great deal to her.

Alfred, as usual, was wrigglingly shy. Billy Knapp several times opened his mouth to object, but somehow closed it slowly each time without having objected. The woman saw. She thought it meant that her presence embarrassed them both, so with true tact she wished them a gentle good-night, and went away.

The three looked at one another.

"Well?" asked Jim defiantly.

Billy coughed. He spat in the fire. He exploded. "Damn it! She goes!" he roared with the voice of a bull.

They both looked expectantly toward Alfred. Alfred nodded his head. He was wondering how long it had been since anyone had prayed for him.

"Thar is a man with her," remarked Jim, after a moment's silence. "He's a tenderfoot. And a kid. The kid has blue eyes, too," he added irrelevantly.

"The camp'll be mighty riled," put in Alfred.

"Let's go see the tenderfoot," suggested the practical Billy.

They dropped everything, and went over to the "hotel," where they viewed the woman's husband at a safe distance. He was a slight, bent man, with near-sighted eyes behind thick spectacles, straight, light hair, and a peering, abstracted expression of countenance. He wore a rather shiny frock coat.

"Gee Christmas!" ejaculated Billy, and laughed loudly.

Alfred shook his head.

Jim looked grave.

They returned to camp, and began to discuss the question of ways and means. There would surely be trouble when the affair became known. The inclusion of a tenderfoot from Chicago, on account of his pinto team, had almost resulted in a riot of the rejected. Not one of the three was fatuous enough to imagine for a moment that Jack Snowie, for instance, who had been refused because he wanted to take his wife, would exactly rejoice over the scouts' decision. In fact, Jack had a rather well-developed sense of injustice, and a summary method of showing it. And he was by no means alone.

Jim agreed to transport the three in his schooner, which was one point well settled. Billy suggested at least a dozen absurd methods of keeping the camp in ignorance until the start had actually been made, each one of which was laughed to scorn by the practical Jim.

"She might put on men's clothes," he concluded desperately.

"For the love of God, what for?" inquired Jim. "Stick to sense, Billy. Besides, there's the kid."

Billy tried once more.

"They might meet us 'bout a hundred mile out. He could take Jim's schooner, here, and mosey out nor'-west, and then jest nat'rally pick us up after we gets good and started. That way, the camp thinks he palavers with Jim and us to get a schooner, and maybe they thinks Jim is a damn fool a whole lot, but Jim don't mind that; do you, Jim?"

"No, I don't mind that," said Jim, "but yore scheme's no good."

"Why?"

"He wouldn't get ten mile before somebody'd hold him up and lift his schooner off him. They's a raft of bad men jest layin' fer a chance like that to turn road agent."

Billy turned a slow brick-red, and got up suddenly, overturning the coffee-pot. A dozen strides brought him to the camp of the Tennessee outfit. There he raised his voice to concert pitch.

"We aims to pull out day arter to-morrow," he bellowed. "We also aims to take with us two tenderfeet, a woman, and a kid. Them that has objections can go to the devil."

So saying, he turned abruptly on his heel and returned to his friends. Jim whistled; but Alfred smiled softly, and began to recap the nipples of his old-fashioned Colt's revolvers. Alfred was at that time the best shot with a six-shooter in the middle West.

Seeing this, Billy's frown relaxed into a grin.

"I'm thinkin' that them that does object probably will go to the devil," said he.

In half an hour the news was all over camp. When Michaïl Lafond heard of it, he left his dinner half eaten and went out to talk earnestly to a great variety of people.

III

THE MAN WHO STOOD "99"

The three scouts would never have been able to explain satisfactorily their reasons for being so easily persuaded, or their obstinacy in adhering to the determination so suddenly made. Prue Welch would have thanked a divine providence for it. The doctor, her husband, took it as quite in the natural course of events.

He was a queer man, the doctor, a pathetic little figure in the world's progress—an outgrowth of it, in a certain way of thinking.

Born of good old New England stock, he spent his studious, hard-working boyhood on a farm. At sixteen he went to the high school, where he was adored by his teachers because he stood ninety-nine in algebra. Inconsequently, but inevitably, this rendered him shy in the presence of girls, and unwarrantably conscious of his hands and feet. So, when he went to college, he spent much time in the library, more in the laboratory, and none at all in the elemental little chaos of a world that can do so much for the wearers of queer clothes and queerer habits of thought. He graduated, a spectacled grind, bowed of shoulder, straight of hair, earnest of thought.

Much reading of abstract speculation had developed in him a reverence for the impractical that amounted almost to obsession. Given a bit of useless information and a chunk of solid wisdom, he would at once bestow his preference on the former, provided, always, it were theoretical enough. He knew the dips of strata from their premonitary surface wiggles to their final plunges into unknown and heated depths. He could deliver to you a cross-section of your pasture lot, streaked like the wind-clouds of early winter; and he could explain it in the most technical language. Nothing rock-ribbed and ancient escaped him in his frequent walks. He saw everything—except, perchance, the beauty that clothes the rock-ribbed and ancient as a delicate aura, invisible to the eye of science—and he labelled what he saw, and ticketed it away in the pigeon-holes of his many-chambered mind, where he could put his finger on it at any given moment in the easiest fashion in the world.

It is very pleasant to know where the Paleozoic has faulted, and how; or why the stratifications of the ice age do not show glacial scorings in certain New England localities. To verify in regard to lamination green volumes of obese proportions, or to recognize the projection into the geological physical world of the thought of a master, this is fine, is noble; this makes to glow the kindly light in spectacled blue eyes.

Adoniram Welch left college with many honors. He returned to his little New England village, and for a space was looked upon as a local celebrity. This is a bad thing for most youths, but Adoniram it affected not at all. It availed only to draw upon him, in sweet contemplation, another pair of blue eyes, womanly, serious blue eyes, under a tangle of curly golden hair.

And so, although Prue Welch was a homely name, and Prue Winterborne a beautiful one, when Adoniram accepted the chair of geology offered him by his alma mater, the owner of the blue eyes went with him, and the new professor's thick spectacles somehow glowed with a kindly warmth, which even fine specimens of the finest fossils had never been able to kindle. He settled down into a little white house, in a little blossomy "yard," under a very big, motherly elm, and gave his days to the earnest mental dissection of the cuticle of the globe. His wife attacked the problem of life on six hundred dollars a year.

Now, from this state of affairs sprang two results. The professor evolved a theory, and Mrs. Professor, although she did not in the least understand what it was all about, came to believe in it, to champion it, to consider it quite the most important affair of the age. The professor thought so, too; and so they were happy and united.

The theory was a tremendous affair, having to do with nothing less than the formation of our continent. It was revolutionary in the extreme, but shed such illumination in hitherto dark corners of this and allied subjects that its probability, prima facie, was practically assured. To Prue Welch it seemed to be quite so; but the inexorable eye of science discerned breaks in the chain of continuity, gaps in the procession of proofs, which, while not of vast importance in a specious argument designed to furnish with peptonized intellectual pabulum the more frivolous-minded layman, nevertheless sufficed to destroy utterly its worth as a serious hypothesis. These breaks, the professor explained, could never be filled except by actual field-work. The proper field, he assured her, was the country of the Black Hills of South Dakota, then as distant as the antipodes. He proved this scientifically. Prue agreed, but did not understand. A number of years later she did understand, from hearing Billy Knapp joking with Alfred.

"These yar hills," said Billy, "was made last. The Lo'd had a little of everything left when he'd finished the rest, so he chucked it down on the prairie, an' called it the Black Hills."

However, the mere fact of her comprehension mattered not one iota. If Adoniram said a thing was so, to Prue its truth at once became age-old.

So it happened that the great theory hung fire wofully, and the country of their dreams came to lie beyond the frontier wilderness, whose tide was but just beginning to ebb back from the pine woods of Wisconsin and the oak openings of Illinois. This was finality. What lay beyond they did not trouble to inquire. The professor sighed the sigh of patient abnegation. The professor's wife believed, with beautiful trust, that a divine providence would provide, and that with the earth-wide fame that must accrue to the author of New World Erosions would come added opportunity for added reputation.

For a number of years the kind-hearted little professor looked steadfastly out of the window during examinations in geology, and turned a resolute deaf ear to the rustling of leaves as the despairing student manipulated a cleverly concealed volume. For a number of years he came home at four o'clock in the afternoon, and feverishly corrected blue books until six, in order to ransom from professional duties the whole of the precious evening. For a number of years he consulted authorities in German and other difficult languages, and waxed ever more enthusiastic over the new theory of erosions. During the interim the baby learned to walk, and Prue's belief in its father strengthened, if such a thing were possible. In time the professor and his wife grew to be quite old. He looked every bit of his thirty, and she was an aged dowager of twenty-five. Little Miss Prue was just two and a half.

One day, early in the spring, the professor was called to the door of his class-room to receive a telegram. He read it quietly, then dismissed his class, and went home.

"Prue," said he to his wife, "my father has just died. I must go up there at once, for he was all I had left in the world, and it is not seemly that I should be from his side."

You can see from his manner of speech that the professor had by now read a great many bookish books.

"We will go together," replied Prue.

So they put away mortality in the old Puritan fashion, standing wistful, but tearless, hand in hand, on the hither side of grief; for though in perspective the figure of the old New Englander loomed with a certain gloomy and ascetic grandeur, in the daily contact he had always held himself sternly and straitly in fear of God. For him the twin lamps of Science and Love had burned but darkly.

Adoniram Welch found himself sole heir of a few thousands and the old home.

On the way back to the college town, they planned the Western trip. The professor was to resign his chair at once. He and Mrs. Prue and little Miss Prue would travel by rail to Kansas or Iowa, there to join one of the wagon-trains which now, in the height of the first great gold excitement, continually braved savage warfare and brute thirst to gain the dark shadows of the hills.

During the next three weeks, Prue was a busy woman. The professor resigned, becoming thereby only "the doctor"; had an explanatory interview with the president of the college, and gave himself over to a series of delightful potterings. He pottered about among his belongings, and personally superintended just how everything was not stowed away. He pottered about among the faculty, to the members of which he talked mysteriously with ill-concealed exultation, for the theory was also a secret. He lovingly packed his books and papers and a small portion of his clothes, all of which Prue had to hunt out and repack. Altogether, he had a delightful, absent-minded time, seeing in the actual world no further than the end of his nose, but in the visionary world of his most technical hopes far beyond the farthest star.

But Prue had a New England village to answer; she had the family's belongings to take care of—no great task in itself; she had little Miss Prue to oversee. Grave men who were professors of astronomy, or Greek antiquities, or Hebrew, and who, therefore, knew all about it, told her, in language of whose correctness Addison would have been proud, that the aborigines of the American plains were bloodthirsty in the extreme. Fluttering women detailed anecdotes of sudden death at the hands of Indians. One and all bade her good-by with the firm conviction, openly expressed, that she would never return; upon which all whom weeping became wept, while others displayed their best handkerchiefs as a sort of defiant substitute for more open emotion. Prue saw the little town fade into distance with mingled feelings, of which terror was the predominant, until her husband explained to her, by the aid of an airy little octavo which he had stuffed into an inadequate bag, that Professor Nincomb's theory of glacial action was not only false, but would be conclusively proved to be so by the new theory of erosion. At this she brightened. Prue owned to a vague impression that glacial action had something to do with the North Pole, so the argument per se had little weight with her. But Prue was a New Englander, and devout in the New England fashion, and she settled back on Divine Providence with great thankfulness. She argued that no scheme of things could dispense ruthlessly with so wonderful an affair as the theory of erosions. Therefore the scheme of things would take care of the only possessor of the theory. Indians lost their terrors, she and little Miss Prue fell asleep together, leaving the doctor still poring excitedly over the octavo of Professor Nincomb.

Their first serious difficulties were encountered at Three Rivers. Of course, in the circumstances, the mild little doctor quite failed in his attempts to secure transportation. How should he, a scientist, know or care anything about gold excitements? The hustle confused him, the crowd stunned him, the fierce self-reliance and lack of consideration of these rough men alarmed him.

He came back to the board hotel very much discouraged. "There is not a conveyance of any sort to be found," he informed Mrs. Prue, "and there is great difficulty in estimating the precise duration of the present state of affairs. It may continue into next summer; or so, at least, I was informed by a very estimable person."

That was unbearable. Think of little Miss Prue being required, in the third year of her diminutive life, to face the heat of the plains in midsummer! Think of the cost of living a twelvemonth in such a place as Three Rivers! Prue put on her hat and went out into the turbulent camp. Until that moment she had deemed it wisest to remain in her room.

She was greeted only with respect. Men paused and looked after her. You see, Prue had such grave, calm eyes, that looked straight at you with so much confidence; and such a sensitive, serious mouth, that argued such a capacity for making up quiet opinions of people—and acting on them—that you were always very much inclined to take off your hat, even if you were Tony Quinn and middling drunk. It was not ten minutes before she had corroborated the doctor's bad news; but she had also heard incidentally of Billy Knapp, Alfred, and Buckley. The hotel-keeper pointed out the latter—that quiet man with the brown beard. Prue went straight to him and stated her case.

In the statement she laid great stress on the importance of the dip of strata. If the doctor did not get to work before long, he would be unable to finish his explorations before his means had become exhausted. Prue waxed quite technical. She used a number of long words and a few long phrases, hoping thus to awe the calm and contemplative individual in front of her.

Buckley did not comprehend the reasons. He did comprehend the unutterable eloquence of the eyes, for though her logic went for naught with the scout, it succeeded nevertheless in impressing Prue herself, in bringing more vividly before her the importance of it all. She clasped her hands, and tears choked her. When she had finished, Jim said gravely that she should go.

IV

ALFRED USES HIS SIX-SHOOTER

Michaïl Lafond merely spread the news, and made it a subject of discussion. In his statements he said nothing of his own grievance, nor did he suggest a plan. He knew that this was not a case for violence, nor did he care that it should become such. His actions always depended very much on how an impulse hit his queerly constructed nature. In the present instance he might either resolve to get even with Billy Knapp by means of personal vengeance, or his anger might take the direction of a cold, set determination to get through the plains journey in spite of the scout's prohibition. That the latter, rather than the former course happened to appeal to him, was purely a matter of chance. So, though he said little to the direct point, the plan finally adopted in secret by a choice few had a good deal of his desire mingled in its substance.

The quiescence of the camp astonished and puzzled the three scouts. They had expected an outbreak, and were prepared for it. It did not come.

The three days slipped by; everything was packed; and early in the morning, before the dawn's freshness had left the air, the little band defiled across the prairie. A curious crowd gathered sleepily to watch it go, but there was no demonstration. Billy openly congratulated himself. Alfred looked to see that his revolvers were still capped.

The party comprised an even dozen "schooners," each drawn by four tough ponies. Besides these, a dozen men rode on horseback. On occasion, their mounts could be pressed into draft service. The men themselves were a representative lot; tall, bronzed, silent. They had taken part in the fierce Indian wars, then just beginning to lull; they had ridden pony-express with Wild Bill; they had stalked revenue officers in the mountains of Tennessee. As they strode with free grace beside their teams, or sat, with loose-swaying shoulders, their wiry little broncos, they drew to themselves in the early light the impressiveness of an age—the age of pioneers.

At their head rode Billy Knapp. At their rear rode Jim Buckley. Alfred was a little of everywhere at once. As a matter of habit, these three carried their rifles cross-fashion in front of them, but the new Winchesters and the old long-barrelled pieces of the other score of men were still slung inside the canvas covers, for the Indian country was yet to see. Beneath the axles hung pails. The wagons contained much food, a good supply of ammunition, and a scanty equipment of the comforts of life. In one of them were three wooden boxes, two trunks, the doctor, Mrs. Prue, and little Miss Prue herself, laughingly proud at being allowed to dangle along the dew-wet grass the heavy coil of a black snake whip.

The men shouted suddenly, the horses leaned to their collars, the wagons creaked, and the swaying procession began to loom huge and ghost-like in the mist that steamed golden-white from the surface of the prairie.

Then, from the haze of the town, six more wagons silently detached themselves, and followed in the wake of the first.

This second caravan differed from the other in that it deployed no outriders, and from the close-drawn canvas of its wagons came, once in a while, the sharp cry of a child, followed immediately by the comforting of a woman. The men drove from the seats, and across the lap of each was a weapon.

About five miles out, the first caravan halted until the second drew nearer. Billy Knapp cantered back to it. One of the men in the foremost wagon thereupon clamped the brake and jumped to the ground, where he stood, leaning on the muzzle of his big mountaineer's rifle, chewing a nonchalant plug.

"What's this?" demanded Billy, reining in his horse.

The man shifted his quid.

"Nawthin'," he drawled, "'xcept that this yare outfit's a-goin' too."

Billy's eyes snapped.

"We settled all thet afore," said he, with outward calm.

"This yare outfit's a-goin' too," reiterated the man.

"The hell it is!" cried the scout angrily. "We all said no women and no poor hosses, and that goes. Yore hosses are a lot of crowbait, and——"

"The women is women as is women," cried another voice, "and not yore leetle white-faced, yaller-haired sort that'd keel over if yo' said boo to her!"

During the laconic dialogue, the schooners had gradually drawn nearer, until now they were grouped in a rough crescent around the two men. Billy looked up to see a tall woman in blue gingham haranguing him from behind one of the seats.

"I reckon if she can go, we can; and you jest chalk that down, Mr. Speckleface!" she went on. Billy was slightly pockmarked.

Other canvas flaps opened, and the audience was increased by half.

"We're goin'," went on the woman, "whether you want us to or not; an' what's more, you got t' take care of us in the Injun country, an' if you don't I'll curse you from the grave, you white-livered, no 'count cradle robber, you! Folks has some rights on the plains, an' you know it jest's well as I do, an' if you think you can shake yore ole pals for a lot of no 'count tenderfeet, an' not find trouble, you jest fools yoreself up a lot, let me tell you that. If Dave yere had th' sperrit of a coyote, he'd fix you, Mr. Seoul!" with vast contempt.

"You men are all alike! A pretty face——" began the virago again, but Billy had fled at speed.

The man, who had been chuckling silently, spat and threw the rifle into the hollow of his arm.

"Good for you, Susie," he remarked.

"You shut up!" replied Susie with acerbity, and retired within. The man had yet to learn that one should never voluntarily step within the notice of an angry woman.

The two wagon-trains proceeded as before—one behind the other by about half a mile.

At intervals Billy or Jim went back to expostulate. They might be able to undertake the responsibility of one woman, hardly of nine! But they never got a hearing, as all the conversation was vituperative and one-sided.

Alfred led the party to a deep, swift crossing of the Platte. By the aid of the extra ponies the ford was made without loss. The second party had a hard struggle, but emerged dripping and triumphant.

Billy and Jim were again put to rout in an attempt at mere verbal dissuasion.

Alfred took them roundabout through a piece of country, cut and gullied by rains. Some hills they climbed by the help of long ropes. The second party dragged their wagons up singly, using all their animals to each wagon. They lost some time, but the evening of the day following they strung out in the rear as imperturbably as ever. Alfred ordered all the riders into the wagons, and, by alternating the ponies, made forced marches, hoping thus to shake the others off. The others, however, discovering that Alfred's party had been doubling and twisting through the worst country, detached a single rider, whose business it was to search out the directest and easiest route. Thus they caught up. Alfred discovered it too late, for they were now on the borders of the Indian country.

Here a serious problem presented itself. The second party had, up to now, made no attempt to close in and join forces. On entering the Indian country, they would certainly do so. The question was, whether they should be resisted or received.

If they were not repulsed, could they be brought through successfully? If they were resisted, would the resistance be effective? One thing or the other must be decided immediately, for, whatever the policy adopted, it must be a settled policy before entering hostile ground.

In the contest of endurance, the score of men comprising the main party had taken part amusedly. They were under the command of the scouts. When the scouts ordered speed, speed was made. When they said to climb hills, hills were climbed. When they advised difficult fords, the difficulties of crossing were overcome. If the other train had trouble keeping up with the procession, why, that was good enough fun. But actual resistance was a different matter. After all, according to their lights, these other men were entirely in the right. They had been excluded from the expedition, on the basis of a rule which had been agreed to after some grumbling; and now that the rule had been broken by the very framers of it, there seemed to be no longer fair grounds of exclusion; and therefore a certain rough sense of justice inclined them to take sides with the bearers of the pea rifles in the rear. At the same time, they felt the truth of Billy's statement, that it would be impossible to get so unwieldy a caravan over the rough country and through the dangers to come. So, seeing reason on both sides, they maintained a guarded neutrality.

Resistance being out of the question, the three next considered the other horn of the dilemma. Alfred rode over to examine the prospective addition to the party. He found the animals in poor condition, partly because of the forced marches he had himself imposed. In his opinion they would not last out the journey, and he so reported, to the great consternation of the other two.

While they lamented, Prue came up and heard a part. She demanded the whole, and they told her frankly. The heroine of romance, realizing herself the cause of the trouble, would have offered to return with the other women, and so the whole question would have been resolved; but Prue was only a very nice little woman, in love with her husband. Her chief concern was not the triumph of eternal justice, but whether the whole expedition would come to nothing. She pondered.

"If you can't keep them from going with us, and if you can't get through if they do go with us," she said finally, "it seems to me that the only way to fix it would be to do something so they couldn't go"—with which vague hint this Puritan looked wickedly at them all, and went away, clinching her small hands with anger. From the hint, they made a plan to which all three agreed.

Next morning Jim roused the camp an hour earlier than usual, and insisted on an immediate departure. The horses were hitched, and the breakfast things put away. Then Alfred rode over to the other camp, with Jim and Billy following at a little distance.

People start a camp on the plains, in a safe country, by arranging the wagons in a rough semicircle. Behind this semicircle the horses are hobbled, and left to graze. In front of it the cooking-fire is built. During the night, besides the regular sentinels, one man is assigned to ride herd, but this is unnecessary in full daylight; so at breakfast the horses are left to graze quite unprotected. In a hostile country, picket ropes and more care are needed. This party had so hobbled twenty-four animals—four for each wagon, which is a scant supply.

Alfred cantered rapidly up to the herd from the east. He had made a long detour, so as to approach in the eye of the sun. With the twelve chambers of his revolvers he killed eleven horses. As I have said, Alfred was one of the best pistol shots in the middle West; After this, he put spurs to his mount, and shot away like an arrow in the direction of his own camp.

The unsuspicious mountaineers, at breakfast, did not gather their wits until too late. Then eight of them leaped fiercely upon some of the remaining animals, and pursued the wagon-train, which, under the frantic urging of Billy and Jim, was already under way in close order. A few of their bullets spattered against the wagon-bodies, and they wounded a horse.

This roused the other men. Neutrality was all right enough, but they could not afford to lose horses, so they made such a brave show of rifle muzzles that the eight fell back. Three to one was too big odds; but their rage was great.

Then Jim took his life in his hands, and rode a little way out on the prairie toward them, waving a white handkerchief. Somebody shot at him, and bored a hole through the looseness of his flannel shirt, whereupon he dismounted and dropped two horses with his new-model Winchester. His own horse was killed in the exchange, but Jim could take care of himself in frontier fashion.

Before the men could reload or move, Jim, imperturbably, arose from behind his dead mount, and waved his white handkerchief again. There was a moment's hesitation, then someone returned the signal. Jim promptly advanced. His remarks were brief and businesslike, and were received in sullen silence.

"You fellows have got to go back," said he. "You have hosses enough left to get your women back with, by goin' slow. If you try to shoot us up any, we'll kill every hoof you have. So don't come any funny business."

He turned squarely on his heel, and walked away rapidly. He wanted to get his distance before the reaction came. Michaïl Lafond, no longer impassive, shook his rifle after him.

"You damn skunk!" he shouted, hoarse with anger. "Tell your damn woman I'll pull every hair from her head!"

Jim did not turn his head, but ducked into the long grass, where he wriggled along Indian fashion. Lafond, who had thrown his rifle into position for a shot, started forward in pursuit, his face twisted with passion, but he was dragged back by main strength. Two of the horses bore double, and the little group turned sullenly toward the east.

The mood of the original party, after this incident, was grim. The bonds of plains brotherhood had been lightly broken.

Alfred had resorted to such desperate measures in making the best of undesirable conditions brought to pass by someone else.

Billy Knapp had done so because he had entered into a game, and declined to be beaten by anyone.

Jim alone was happy. He had done it solely and simply for a woman; and the woman had seen him fight for her.

V

LAFOND DESERTS

The eight men of the attacking party returned slowly to the little dip of land which held the temporary camp. They were defeated, baffled, and angry. If a stranger had accosted them at that moment, he would probably have been gruffly answered one minute and assaulted the next. But for the present they were silent. They were Anglo-Saxons and Tennessee mountaineers for the most part; hence they were also adaptable, and attuned to the fatalism that comes from much contemplating of cloud-capped peaks and wind-swept pines.

Not so with Michaïl Lafond, who alternately raved and wept, frantically brandishing his rifle. An impassive mountaineer sat behind him, holding him to the party. If not thus restrained, he would, in the heat of anger, have attacked the whole train single-handed, for he was brave enough in his way. The sober second-thought of the Indian in him might perhaps have caused him to pause on the brink of the charge and sink into the long grasses to await the chance of a more silent blow; but the impulse up to that point would have been real and whole-souled. So it was now. The man raved as a maniac might. He called down the curses of heaven on his companions for cowards.

And in this, when he reached camp, he was ably seconded by the women. They surrounded him in a voluble and indignant group, and listened to him with sympathy, casting glances of scorn toward their passive lords and masters in the background. In their way they became as excited as Lafond. One or two wept. Most employed the variety of their vocabularies in giving the world what is known as a "piece of their minds."

In the still air of a prairie morning their hysterical cackle rose like the crying of an indignant band of brant. Lafond told, dramatically, what should have been done. The women, in turn, told how effectively they would have done it. The men were taking stock of the situation.

The mountaineers wasted little discussion on what might have been done. The question before them was that of the most practical method of returning over the long miles of prairie they had traversed in their pursuit of Alfred and his outfit. They entertained not a moment's doubt as to the necessity of the return. Their equipment consisted now of ten horses and six wagons. By humoring the animals they might be able to get through with a pair to each schooner. This meant the abandonment of one of the wagons, and the lightening of the others. It was decided. One of the men strode to the group of women.

Lafond was in the midst of a tirade, but when he saw the mountaineer approach, he prepared to pay eager attention to the plan of action.

"H'yar," announced the latter, with a little the heavier shading on his accustomed drawl, "that's enough of this h'yar jaw, I reckon. You-all come along and pack up."

"And when is it that we do pursue them?" asked Lafond eagerly.

"Pursue nothin'," replied the man. "We're goin' back."

There was a moment's silence.

"And you intend not to get that revenge?" the half-breed inquired.

"Revenge!" snorted the man. "You damn fool—with that outfit?" He swept a descriptive gesture toward the women. "Besides, what's the good now?" Lafond fell silent, and withdrew from the group.

The man of mixed blood is not like other men, and cannot be judged by the standards of either race. From his ancestors he takes qualities haphazard, without balance or proportion, so that the defects of virtues may often occur without the assistance of the virtues themselves. And, besides, he develops traits native to neither of the parent races, traits which perhaps can never be comprehended by us who call ourselves the saner people. He is superstitious, given to strange impulses, which may unexpectedly, and without reason, harden into convictions; obscure in his ends; unscrupulous in his means. No man lives who can predict what may or may not suffice to set into motion the machinery of his passions. A triviality is enough to-day. To-morrow the stroke of a sledge may not even jar the cogs. But, once started, the results may be tremendous, and quite out of proportion to the first careless touch on the lever. Such passions are dangerous, both to their possessor and to those who stand in their way.

A SIOUX COUNCIL

Now, from the gainsaying of his lesser revenge—the proving to Billy Knapp the futility of his objections—Lafond conceived the desire for a greater. There entered into his life one of those absorbing passions which are to be encountered in all their intensity only in such men as he—passions which come to be ruling motives in the lives of those who harbor them; gathering to themselves all lesser forces which are spread more evenly over saner existences; losing their first burning intensity, perhaps, but becoming thereby only the more sustained, cool, and deadly; so that at the last they lie unnoticed in the background of the man's ordinary life, coloring, influencing every act—a religion to which, without anger, but without relenting, he bends every long-planned effort of even his trivial and daily deeds. You may not understand this, unless you have known a half-breed; but it is true.

Interrupted in the midst of his flow of anger, and deprived of the immediate solace of shooting things at his enemies, Lafond fell into a sulking fit. During the rest of the day he brooded. After dark that night he wound his way silently through the grasses, crept up behind the solitary sentinel considered necessary in this peaceful country, stabbed the man in the back, and returned to camp. Thus his way was clear. Then he took from the wagons three slabs of bacon, a small sack of coffee, a large supply of powder, lead, and caps, a blanket, and a frying-pan and cup. With these he mounted the hill, past the dead sentinel, to the ponies. Two of the latter he drew apart from the herd. One of them he saddled; the other he packed with his supplies. Then the half-breed led them silently westward for a good half-mile. Then he mounted and rode away.

VI

THE WOMAN AND THE MAN

The wagon-train under the command of Billy Knapp, and Alfred, and Jim Buckley had a very hard trip before they were done with it. The only difficulty they did not encounter was lack of water. There was too much of that. Several times the party had to camp in one spot for days while the wagons were laboriously warped across rivers of mud and quicksand, with steep, slippery clay banks. How little Prue stood the journey so well, neither her father, her mother, nor the men of the party were able to divine; but she did, and, what is more, she seemed to think it great fun. So cheerful was she, and so sunny, that the men came to grudge each other her company. And as for Mrs. Prue and the doctor, who could help loving the patient sweetness of the one, or the pathetic, gentle, impracticable kindness of the other?

Yes, it was a hard journey; but somehow the feeling was not entirely of joy and relief when the stockade of Frenchman's Creek shimmered across the broad, flat foot-hills. There they separated. The dangers were over.

Then, to the surprise of everyone, the doctor waked up and knew just where he wanted to go. He displayed an unexpected familiarity with the general topography of the hills. It puzzled Billy. And, to the vaster astonishment of both his confrères, Jim suddenly announced, with quite unwonted volubility, that he had been intending all along to start in prospecting at the end of this trip, and that here he meant to quit scouting and leave the society of his brothers in arms—unless, of course, he added, as a doubtful afterthought, they wanted to join him. They profanely replied that they did not.

Most of the men pushed on immediately to Rockerville, whither a majority of the former inhabitants of Frenchman's Creek had already emigrated. Alfred and Billy decided to get over in the Limestone for a "big hunt" before returning East. Prue said good-by to them with real feeling, and most of them threw out their chests and were very gruff and rude because they were sorry to leave. Prue understood. They were kind-hearted men, after all, these rough pioneers. Billy remembered for almost two years how she looked when she said that, which was extraordinary for Billy. He had led so varied a life as pony-express rider, stage-driver, scout, Indian, bronco-buster, hunter, and trapper, that he had little room in his memory for anything short of bloodshed or a triumph for himself.

Finally, after all the rest had gone, Jim and the doctor made the mutually delightful discovery that they had selected the same locality, the one for his prospecting, the other for his scientific investigations. So the doctor simply left his outfit in Jim's wagon, and they all went up together.

The little scientist was as excited as a child. To him the country was as a document—a document which he had studied thoroughly in the pocket editions. He now had it before him in the original manuscript, open and unabridged.

And indeed, even to an ordinary observer, the Black Hills are a strange series of formations.

They run north and south at the westernmost edge of the northern prairie, and are, altogether, about as large as the State of Vermont. Unlike other ranges, they possess no one ridge that serves as a backbone to the system. The separate peaks rise tumultuously, like the rip of seas in a tideway, without connection, solitary, sombre. Between them lie deep gorges, or broad stretches of grass-park, which dip away and away, until one catches the breath at the grand free sweep of them. Huge castellated dikes crop up from the ridge-tops like ramparts. Others rise parallel in the softest verdure, guarding between their perpendicular sides streets as narrow and clean-cut as the alleys of a city of skyscrapers.

Through it all, back and forth, like the walls of a labyrinth, run the broken, twisted, faintly defined geological systems, which cross each other so frequently and so vigorously that all semblance of order is lost in the tumultuous upheaval. Here are strata deposited by the miocene tertiary; here are breakings forth of metamorphic rocks of many periods; here are the complex results of diverse influences and forces. Down in the south is a great cavern—of which ninety-seven miles and twenty-five hundred rooms have, at this writing, been explored—which was once the interior of a geyser. For ages it spouted; for ages more its fluids crystallized and petrified into varied and beautiful forms; and then, finally, many layers of stratified rock were slowly overlaid to seal forever this dried-out, beautiful, lifeless mummy of a cave. It lies there now, as it has lain through the centuries, with a single, tiny opening by which it can be entered—a palace of vast re-echoing halls, hung with jewels, a horror-haunted honeycomb of unsounded depths, a solemn abode wherein not the faintest drip of water, not the gentlest sigh of air through the corridors, breaks the eternal silence. Only its mouth roars continually as the winds rush in or out. The Indians assign to it the spirits of their dead warriors, and cannot be induced to approach it. Geologists rave over it, and cannot be persuaded to come away.

But this is in the latter day of railroads and tenderfeet. At the time of which this story treats, little was known of the country. It was simply a great second-hand shop, of a little of everything in the geological line.

When the party arrived at Spanish Gulch, the doctor was so eager to get into the wonderful hills that only with the greatest difficulty did he constrain himself to help Jim erect a log cabin for the accommodation of his family. Even then he was not of much use, although he could at least help to lift timbers. Jim practically did it alone, and it took him almost a month; but when it was done, it was very nice. The doctor accepted the free gift of the scout's labor and skill quite as a matter of course, just as he had taken the free gift of an ordinarily expensive pilotage across the plains; but the woman appreciated, and perhaps she understood, for she suddenly became very shy in Jim's presence. And then, sometimes, she would gaze at him, when he was not looking, with an adoration of gratitude filling her eyes.

After the doctor's home was finished, Jim betook himself into another gulch, where he constructed a less elaborate shelter for his own occupation. Thenceforward he spent much of his time in mysterious prospecting operations; but two or three times a week he liked to sit perfectly silent under the tree which overshadowed the doctor's cabin, watching Prue, if she happened to be near, playing with Miss Prue, or trying to talk with the doctor. He never went inside the house, even in the winter; and he never seemed to try to know Prue any more intimately. It would have been difficult for him to say just what pleasure he discovered in these visits.

After a little, the routine of life became fixed. The doctor took up his work systematically. Each morning he plunged into the hills. His little bent form moved from ridge to ridge, following his own especial leads as earnestly as the most eager gold prospector of them all. Sometimes he got lost, but generally he managed to reach home at sunset. He was entirely preoccupied. He ate his meals as they were set before him without question, he pulled on his well-mended clothes without noticing the new patches, he warmed himself before his fire without a thought of whence came the wood, blazing up the mud-chimney.

Prue at first wondered a little at this, for even in his intensest absorption the doctor's home-life had been much to him; but in time she came to appreciate his mood, and to rely on herself even more than usual. She had such an exalted opinion of his work that she easily fell into the habit of sacrificing herself to it. She watched for the things that pleased him, or, rather, did not bother him, for his pleasures were negative; she carefully excluded all disturbing influences, and came to look on this lonely time as only a probation, sooner or later to be over, after which, in the fulness of his success, he would turn to her with his old love. To hasten this she would have cut off her right hand.

So, much to the disgust of Jim Buckley, the brave little woman took the management of things upon herself. During the long days, while the doctor was away, she schemed to make both ends meet. She raised a few vegetables in a plot of open ground on the sunny side of the creek, working in it daily with an old spade. Her face was hidden in the depths of a sunbonnet, and her hands were covered with a pair of deerskin gauntlets, for she could not forget, poor woman! that she was gently bred, and she hated to see her skin reddening in the dry air of the hills.

Items of necessity she bought scantily, sparingly, of travelling pedlars, for prices were high. Candles for the winter, corn-meal, occasionally flour, coffee, sugar—all these counted. Things cost so much more here than she had anticipated. Prue saw the end coming, distant though it might be. She sometimes did little bits of mending for passing miners, and was paid for it. Oftener she skimped on the daily meals, pretending that she was tired and did not care to eat. The doctor never noticed, nor did she mean that he should.

In the presence of his work, he could think of nothing else. Once, when they ran out of wood, she told him of it. It worried him for a week. Material necessities drew his mind away from the attitude of calm scientific investigation. The pile of fuel that goes with every new shack lasted the first winter through. After that was gone, Prue used the chips made when the house was built, as long as they held out. Then she tried to chop down a tree herself. Jim Buckley found her sitting on a stone, the axe between her knees, her face buried in her hands. Beside her was a pine scarred at random with weak, ill-directed blows. He made a few profane remarks into his thick beard concerning the doctor, then took the axe from her, and started to work. In a week enough firewood was piled over against the house to last the winter. During that week he ate his noon meals in the little cabin. The woman did her best, and used up a fortnight's provisions in the attempt to make a respectable showing before the hungry man. But in spite of that he saw through her pitiful efforts, and offered to let her have money. She drew herself up and showed him the door. When he had gone, bewildered, she went out and looked at the white shining wood-pile and wept bitterly.

But in spite of economy the closest, and the sacrifice of absolutely every non-essential, the time came when the last cent had gone. The woman stood face to face with want. And, as ill-luck would have it, at this period the doctor was especially brimming with enthusiasm, for he had almost achieved the one result he needed to fill out his scheme. He worked feverishly to forestall the snow. He was full of his system, alternating between glowing enthusiasm and a haunting fear that the winter would set in too early. He must have uninterrupted time for work until then, he said. On this depended his professional reputation, their fortune.

She set her lips firmly and looked about her. The flour and meal were gone; there were no candles, and without candles how could the doctor put the last touches to his book when winter fell? Little light filtered through the oiled paper of the windows. She sold her ring to some passing gamblers. The money soon slipped away. For a few days she fought hard with her pride. Then she put on her sunbonnet, and, kissing the child tenderly, went, with heightened color, down the gulch to Jim Buckley's.

She found him sitting on a stump in front of his dirt-roofed shack, pounding into sand some quartz in an iron mortar. He did not hear her until she stood beside him. Then he arose, drawing his gaunt form up quickly, taking off his broad hat, and wiping his grimy hands on his jeans.

"Mr. Buckley," she said hurriedly, before he could speak, "I have come to tell you how sorry I am that I was so rude to you. You have been very kind to me, and I had no right to speak to you as I did. No, no!" she implored, as Jim opened his mouth to expostulate. "I must tell you that, and please don't interrupt me.

"My husband is doing some very valuable work," Prue continued, "very valuable, and when he gets it done he will be very famous and very rich. But just now it takes all his time and attention, so that he doesn't realize—how—poor—we—are." The little woman's cheeks burned, and she lowered her head until the sunbonnet hid her face. "Of course, if I should tell him," she went on proudly, "he would attend to it at once. But I mustn't do that. He needs such a little time to finish his work, and I mustn't—must I?" And she suddenly looked up into Jim's honest eyes with an imploring gesture.

Jim was standing, his broad hat against his knee, looking at her fixedly. No doubt he was thinking how, when he had first seen her, her cheeks were as full and ripe as the apples of his old home in New England; and was wondering if the dip of strata were worth this. Seeing that he intended no reply, she looked down again and went on.

"I came here to see you about that. Once, Mr. Buckley, you offered to lend me some money, and I—I—am afraid I was very rude. And now—oh, dear!" And suddenly the poor little figure in faded and patched calico sank to the ground, and began to sob as if her heart would break.

Jim was distressed. He started forward, hesitated, looked up at the sky and down the gulch. Then he threw down his hat and darted into the cabin, returning in a moment with a buckskin bag, which he tossed impulsively into her lap.

"There, there!" he said distractedly. "Why didn't you say so before? Stop! Please stop! Oh, the——"

She looked up suddenly with a blinding smile.

"Now, don't say anything naughty!" she cried airily through her tears. She laughed queerly at Jim's open mouth and astonished eyes. He could not grasp the meaning of her change of mood. Before he could recover, she was on her feet, a roguish vision of blushing cheeks and dancing eyes. She shook the buckskin bag in his face.

"Aren't you afraid you'll never be paid, sir?" she demanded; then, with a quick sob, "I think you are the kindest man in all the world!" The next instant the alders closed about her fluttering figure on the trail. For a week after, her cheeks burned, and she was afraid to look out of the cabin lest Jim should be coming up the path.

As the winter wore away, however, she began to see the bottom of the little buckskin bag. The doctor was as absorbed as ever. She could not bring her pride to the point of asking Buckley for another loan, and so again the terror of poverty seized upon her. Her eyes looked harassed and worn, and her mouth had queer little lines in the corners. She would stand watching the flames in the chimney for hours, and then would turn suddenly, hungrily, and snatch up the little girl, devouring her with kisses. Sometimes she would wrinkle her brow, peeping into the doctor's manuscripts, trying to make out how near the end he was, but she always laid them down with a puzzled sigh. She did not eat enough, and she grew thin. She tried expedients of which she had read. For instance, one day she went down into the creek bottom and cut some willows. She peeled the bark from them, and from the inside rind she collected a quantity of fine white dust, with which she made a pasty kind of dough. The biscuits were tough and of a queer flavor. Even the doctor, after tasting one of them, looked up in surprise.

"What do you call this, my dear?" he inquired.

She clapped her hands gayly, and laughed with a catch in her voice.

"Oh, a queer Indian dish I've learned, that's all. You never do pay any attention to what you eat, so I thought I'd make you for once."

"Oh," said the doctor, smiling faintly.

The willow flour appeared no more.

So the long winter drew to its close, and still the brave little woman set her face resolutely forward, striving to help the doctor with his life-work as only a woman can. She could see no way out. The case was hopeless, and often she shed impotent tears over her inability. He worked so hard, and she did so little!

And then the spring brought with it the solution.

VII

THE REINS OF POWER

For two weeks after, Michaïl Lafond, cut loose from the crippled wagon-train returning to Three Rivers, travelled westward by the sun, sleeping under the stars, living on bacon, coffee, and an occasional bit of small game, drinking muddy water from buffalo wallows which providential rains had filled. At the end of that time he was raided by the Sioux. When they approached him, he led forward his two ponies, placed his rifle on the ground in front of their noses, unslung his powder-horn and laid it beside the weapon, and stepped back, throwing his arms wide apart. The Indians rode forward silently, a strange, naked band, whose fancy ran to chrome yellow, and took possession of Lafond and his equipment.

The half-breed became a squaw man, and lived with these Indians for some time. At first he was given drudgery to do. He did it, but kept his eyes open, and learned the language. After a little his chance came.

The band captured a wagon-train, and massacred its men and women. It found itself in possession of fifty or sixty horses, half a score of wagons, some provisions, and a goodly quantity of blankets, axes, utensils, and the rude necessities of life on the frontier. An Indian cannot possess too many ponies, he is always ready to eat, and blankets come handy in winter; but he has absolutely no use for the rest of the plunder. So he usually puts a torch to the lot, and has a bonfire by way of celebration.

On this occasion, Michaïl Lafond succeeded in getting Lone Wolf to postpone the bonfire, to lend him twenty ponies, and to detail to his service half as many squaws. The feat in itself was a mark of genius, as anyone who knows the Indian character will admit, and cost Michaïl many of his newly learned words, put together with all of his native eloquence.

The twenty ponies, driven by the ten squaws, drew the schooners and their contents to the Bad Lands, where Michaïl concealed them in a precipitous gully of the deeply eroded sort so common in that strange, rainless district. Then he returned fifteen of the ponies to Lone Wolf. Lone Wolf's band took up quarters within striking distance of the cached schooners.

All this was done by Michaïl Lafond, and when it was completed he drew a long breath. He felt that the foundations of his influence were laid. It was no light thing thus to have drawn self-willed savages from their accustomed ways of life. He had done it only by vague promises of great benefits to accrue in the immediate future, said benefits to be "big medicine" in the extreme. Lone Wolf had pondered much; had seen an opportune shooting star; had consented.

A month later, a half-breed returned alone across the plains from the hill country. At Pierre he announced open trail. He had himself come through without the least trouble, he claimed, although he had seen many Indians. This was strictly true. He went on to say that he would sell his outfit cheap, as he was anxious to go on east. The gold prospects were good. He had a partner squatting on several claims, to whom he would return the following year. He hinted mysteriously of capital to be invested and exhibited a small nugget of placer gold. Most of this was untrue, and the nugget he had found, not in the placer beds, but in a small pasteboard box in one of the schooners.

The outfit brought three hundred and fifty dollars, for the half-breed sold cheap. With this money and the horses he departed the day following.

Michaïl was now richer by three hundred and fifty dollars and five horses than he had been before his capture by the Indians. Were it not for two considerations, he might have decamped with the proceeds. Conscience was not one of them. In the first place, his Caucasian instincts taught him to look ahead to larger things. In the second place, his Indian blood would not let him lose sight of certain bits of savagery he had in contemplation. So, instead of decamping, he purchased with the money, in a town where he was unknown, five of the new breech-loading rifles and nearly five thousand rounds of ammunition. His tale here was simple. The trail was not open, and a wagon-train was soon to attempt the task of opening it. He loaded the munitions on his five broncos, and joined Lone Wolf, who was outlying near at hand.

In the course of the next six months a certain half-breed, with various stores and outfits, was observed in several small towns on the border of the frontier. In half of them he was headed east and sold his outfit; in the other half he was headed west and bought rifles. At the end of the year there remained no more schooners in the cache of the Bad Lands, but Lone Wolfs band was the best armed in all the West. Michaïl Lafond had let slip the chance of embezzling some thousands of dollars, but he had gained what was much mere valuable to him—power over an efficient band of fighting men, and the implicit confidence of a tribe of Sioux Indians. He was respected and feared. His unseen influence was felt throughout the whole plains country.

Lafond was too shrewd either to repeat his venture or to become identified with the tribe. His influence, as has been said, was unseen and unsuspected. Lone Wolf's band was successful from the Indian standpoint, pernicious from the white man's. That was all that appeared on the outside. Lafond himself became a savage. He slept out with little cover, and often rode with none at all. He ate dog and rattlesnake, when dog and rattlesnake happened to be on the bill of fare. He carried a knife deep in the recess of a long, loose buckskin sheath; and from the ridge of his tepee hung five clotted horrors, torn from the heads of the victims of his personal prowess. The number of these might easily have been augmented, but Michaïl struck seldom in his own person. When he did, not one of the victims escaped, for no man must have seen Michaïl, the savage. Michaïl, the civilized, would need a clear field before him when once again he appeared in the towns.

The life was fascinating to such as he. He loved it, but he did not forget his purposes. When at last he had gathered firmly the reins of his power, he shook them, and the twin steeds of Murder and Rapine swept destroyingly through the land.

For the present there was peace on the plains. Wagon-trains came across the Pierre trail, or further down along South Fork. Custer explored. White men settled in the Black Hills, in spite of the treaty. The Indians hunted buffalo, and their wives made robes, and cut tepee poles from the valley of Iron Creek.

But in spite of all the seeming tranquillity, the seeds of discord had been sown broadcast, and Lafond, with his devilish cleverness of insight, could see that the struggle was not long to wait. Both sides felt aggrieved, and both sides had more than a show of reason for feeling so. Perhaps, in the long run, this was an inevitable result of the advance of civilization; but it is a little unfortunate that the provisional races must be set aside so summarily. That fact serves occasionally to cast a doubt in reflective minds on the ultimate benefit of the civilization.

We who look upon our tamed country, or those plainsmen who have perforce to struggle in the thick of the avenging troubles which follow injustice as surely as symptoms follow the disease, may not be able to see the Indian's side of the question. We, the peaceful citizens, enjoy the security of policed cities and fenced prairies; and we are convinced that it is worth the price. They, the pioneers, fight, and are maimed; they lose their worldly possessions, and their heart-strings are twanged to the tuning of grief; and so they become partisans, to whom the old scriptural saying that "he who is not for me is against me" comes home with a sternness brewed of tears.

But to those others who looked on from the height, to the men who sat safe, but moved the pawns on the board—to them there was a real justice, and they infringed it; a real duty, and they failed it. They held the whip hand and spared not the lash, and it shall be visited unto them.

Nearly fifty years ago, a Lieutenant Warren, at the head of a small exploring party, approached the Black Hills. He was met near the South Fork by a friendly but firm deputation of Sioux chiefs. Pah-sap-pah was sacred. Pah-sap-pah must not be entered. All the rest of the country was open, by the courtesy of the red men, to their white brothers, but sacred land must not be profaned. Warren acquiesced, and contented himself with ascertaining the general extent and configuration of the forbidden district. When, in the fulness of time, the government entered into treaty with these Indians, Warren's policy was continued, and the Black Hills were, by a special clause, exempted from white invasion forever. According to the Indians, the place was the abode of spirits, and each tree, each rock, each dell, had its own especial manitou whom it were sacrilege to offend by the touch of profane hands.

For many years the treaty was respected. Then a Pawnee brought into one of the reservations a small quantity of gold dust, which he confessed to have found in the Hills.

The following spring, Custer, at the head of an expedition of one thousand two hundred men, entered into a long scout with the avowed purpose of exploring the Black Hills for indications of gold. In this he acted directly under his governmental orders. Thus was the treaty first broken.

Next year the Hills were overrun with miners, illegal miners, just as the troops had been with illegal explorers. They scattered through the wilderness in vast numbers, and about a hundred of them staked out, near the centre of the Southern Hills, a town which they named Custer City. The irony was unconscious. What followed was farcical, and was relished as such by the participants. Bodies of troops were sent to enforce the treaty. Legally they did so. Although inferior in numbers to the miners, and no better armed, they succeeded several times in sweeping all the trespassers together into one band. The latter submitted good-naturedly. The culprits were then turned over to civil authority. Civil authority waited only for the disappearance of the troops to set the miners at liberty; whereupon they scurried, as fast as their animals could carry them, back to the prospect-holes of their choice. It was all a huge joke, and everybody knew it.

In the meantime the Indians were becoming restive. It may not be known to the general reader, but it is a fact, that one of the strongest virtues of the red man's character is his fidelity to his given word. A liar is, in his moral code, the most despised of men. He cannot conceive the possibility of broken faith, and there are recorded instances wherein an Indian condemned to capital punishment has been set free on his oral promise to return for his hanging; and he has returned. Therefore the Sioux could not understand the infraction of the treaty.

They had viewed with alarm the scouting expedition by Custer. On the invasion by the horde of miners, the following spring, an outbreak was only avoided by the prompt action of the troops in evicting the trespassers; but now, this winter of 1875, the more sagacious of the Indian leaders were beginning to suspect the truth, namely, that the eviction had been nothing but a form, and that Pah-sap-pah, in spite of the treaty, was lost to them forever. Affairs were ripe for a great Indian war; and, realizing this, the department set on foot Crook's and Reynolds' unfortunate expedition toward the Big Horn.

The savages at once began to gather under a famous chief, Sitting Bull. The storm rumbled, and Custer was despatched to effect a junction with his brother officers somewhere north of the Hills.

VIII

THE MAKING OF A HOSTILE

Meanwhile a personal animus had sprung up against that general because of a mild stroke of justice on his part against a singularly proud man.

It seems that the personnel of Custer's former expedition to the Yellowstone included two civilians, a Dr. Honzinger and a Mr. Baliran. These men were not, of course, subject to the full rigor of military discipline, and so were accustomed to depart from, and return to, the main line of march at will. When they did not reappear in due time from one of these little trips, search was made; and they were found killed with arrows. Dr. Honzinger's skull was crushed in, but neither man was scalped, for the doctor was bald and the other wore his hair clipped short. Some time later, knowledge of the murderer's identity came to light, through information stumbled upon by one of Custer's own scouts.

At that period, rations and ammunition were distributed regularly at the various agencies. In return the savages promised to be good Indians and to submit to the white men's laws. This promise they kept faithfully enough, but according to their own standards. At the times of distribution, when inevitably a great many of the Indians were gathered together, the occasion was signalized by feasting and ghost dances. The latter are uncouth exhibitions enough, consisting decoratively of much cheap body-paint, many eagle feathers, and trashy jewelry; musically of most unmusical pounding and screaming; and physically of a crouching posture and a solemnly bounding progression from one foot to the other around a circle. They are accompanied by a recital of valorous deeds.

Such a dance was organized at the Standing Rock Agency, below Fort Lincoln, in the winter of 1875. As usual, besides the gathering of old warriors and squaws, assembled to watch the dance, the audience included a number of white men, present on business or pleasure. Among them was Charley Reynolds, one of Custer's scouts. This man stood exchanging idle comment and chaff with another scout, and throwing an occasional glance in the direction of the vortex of dancers, swirling about in gaudy confusion, like a whirlwind of autumn leaves. Suddenly he closed his mouth with a snap and leaned forward at keen attention. He had caught a few words that interested him.

The dancers had reached the point of frenzy. They leaped forward with solemnity still, but it was a quivering solemnity held in leash. Their bodies were tense, and the trailing knives and hatchets trembled with nervous force. Each warrior, nostrils distended and eyes flashing, was declaiming his deeds with an ecstasy that bordered on madness, rolling out tale after tale of murder, theft of horses—the only sort of theft countenanced by the Indian code—and fortitude under suffering. Noticeable among these dancers was a young warrior painted in the manner of the Uncpapa Sioux. He was of magnificent physique and striking countenance, but the most remarkable feature of his appearance was a huge, ragged scar across the muscles of his back. When the scout looked toward him, he was shaking in the air the chain of a watch, and declaiming at the top of his voice in the Sioux language.

"And he was great in body," he chanted, "and he fell, and I killed him with a stone, and the other fled, and I shot him, and so they died! I killed them! I am a great warrior, for I killed two white men, and these things are tokens that I speak the truth!"

He rattled the chain, and went through a vivid pantomime of the slaying of the two white men. Charley Reynolds recognized the trinket as belonging to Dr. Honzinger.

The young warrior was called Rain-in-the-Face, and he was at that time esteemed as the bravest of the northern Sioux. Others, such as Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull, might have been greater in generalship, but neither had the Uncpapa youth's reputation for sheer personal bravery. In the sun dance he had hung for four hours. The incisions behind the great muscles of the back, through which the rope was threaded, had been cut too deep, and the flesh failed to give way when Rain-in-the-Face was suspended. For some time he hung in midair, his whole weight depending from the loops of torn muscles, the blood streaming over his limbs, and the hot sun beating down upon him. Then the chiefs attempted to cut him down, but Rain-in-the-Face refused to permit it. Four hours later the flesh rent away from his bones, and he fell. That day made him the idol of the Sioux nation.

Charley Reynolds lost no time in informing Custer of his discovery, for the policy of the period was to punish as many culprits as possible, in order that the whites might establish, as soon as might be, a moral as well as military supremacy over the turbulent savages. The commander resolved to arrest Rain-in-the-Face. To that end he detailed a hundred men under Captain Yates.

Contrary to what one unused to the Indian character might expect, no difficulty was anticipated in finding the culprit. To be sure, the plains were broad and the hiding places many, but Rain-in-the-Face was at once an agency Indian and a reckless man. He drew his rations and he drew them boldly. With his blanket wrapped about him and his rifle peeping from its folds across his left arm, he stalked here and there among the agency's few buildings. Any distribution day at the reservation would discover him there.

But, on the other hand, the captain was not at all sure of being able to arrest him when found. A hundred men would stand but small chance in a fight with six hundred well-armed savages; whereas the appearance of a larger expedition would serve merely to frighten every agency Indian out into the wilds. The situation was not encouraging. How not to alarm the quarry, and how still to possess strength enough to seize it, was the problem that confronted Captain Yates.

His first move may seem, when cursorily examined, most unwise. He detailed a lieutenant and forty of his little command, whose orders were to proceed farther down the river, ostensibly for the purpose of making inquiries concerning three Osage Indians wanted for murder. Thus his available force was reduced to sixty, and with that handful he intended to capture and take away, in the face of ten times the number, one of the most popular fighting men of the Sioux nation.

But, as a matter of fact, in so dividing his forces the captain was correct in his tactics. He realized that surprise was his only effective weapon, and his ruse made surprise certain by lulling any suspicion as to the object of the expedition.

Arrived at the agency, a cursory examination disclosed the fact that Rain-in-the-Face was not among the groups of Indians camped on the prairie. He must, therefore, be inside the agency building itself. Captain Yates distributed his men near the little structure, and Colonel Tom Custer went inside with half a dozen soldiers.

The room was found to be full of blanketed Sioux warriors, muffled to the eyes, indistinguishable in the half light, except as eagle-feathered silhouettes. Greetings were exchanged, pipes filled, and a grave silence fell on the little group. The minutes passed, but no one moved. The atmosphere was dense with smoke, and still the parties watched each other—the whites with veiled eagerness, the Indians with unsuspicious stolidity. Finally the agent piled dry wood on the fire, and the blaze leaped up the chimney. The heat became oppressive, so after a moment the warrior nearest the fireplace threw back the blanket from his shoulders. It was Rain-in-the-Face himself.

On this rather dramatic disclosure, one of the troopers uttered an exclamation. The Indian, always suspicious, at once leaped back and cocked his rifle; but before he could raise the piece or pull the trigger, Colonel Custer wound his arms around him from behind. The other Indians rushed from the room.

The captive's hands were tied as rapidly as possible, but by the time he was brought to the door, the Indians were running angrily from all directions toward the building.

Captain Yates had succeeded in intimidating the first comers by a show of force, but he was soon outnumbered and a struggle seemed imminent.

However, an old chieftain began to declaim in the violent, high-pitched monotone so much affected by Indian orators. This delay afforded the soldier a much needed respite, but it tended also to concerted action later. The white man seized his opportunity. Through the interpreter he called upon the chiefs to stand forward for a parley.

"My brothers will hear me," said the interpreter for him, "because it is right, for they wear the Great Father's blankets and his food is in their bellies. This young warrior is brave and his enemies are as the feeble wind to him. But his eye became blinded. He thought he saw before him the Pawnees, the enemies of his people; but they were old men of my race. He killed those old men, and now the Great Father would know why. He must tell the Great Father of his blindness. Therefore it is well that he should go.

"So restrain your young men and I will restrain mine. It might be that your young men would kill many of mine; and it might be that my young men would kill many of yours. But why kill them? It is useless, for first of all, by my hand, this young warrior would die."

At the advance of the chiefs, the Sioux warriors had suddenly, from the wildest confusion, calmed to the deepest attention. They stood motionless against the white background of the snow, only their fierce eyes rolling from the speaker to their own chiefs and back again. One of the latter replied—

"It is not well to talk so," he said brusquely. "The words of my brother are idle words and mean nothing. My young men are many, and yours are few; yet shall your young men go unharmed if you give to us our warrior."

He swept his blanket over his shoulder with a sudden gesture, and scowled. For answer Captain Yates drew from its holster his army revolver and presented it at Rain-in-the-Face's breast. The Sioux looked far away beyond the horizon, but his nostrils dilated.

"It is well," said the chief hastily, "for my brother's words are words of wisdom. Take two warriors to the Great Father, but leave us this young man, that he may teach us that blindness is not wise."

In answer to his gesture two Indian youths stepped forward, proud of the distinction.

"See," went on the chief, "these shall go with your young men, and all will be well."

Yates lowered his pistol, and turned.

"Tell him," he said to the interpreter, "that this man goes with us. If I see the muzzle of a rifle, I'll shoot him dead."

The savages listened gravely. Their first burst of rage had passed, and, as always with their race, they were loath to engage in a stand-up fight in cold blood. The Indian is brave enough, but he likes to be brave in his own way. The chief turned and waved his hand. Ten minutes later bands of savages were speeding swiftly away in all directions, and the agency was entirely deserted.

The little command shortly after set out on its return trip. Yates fully expected to be attacked before he rejoined his chief; but although many savages were at various times visible, hurrying by, the troops arrived at Fort Lincoln in due course, and Custer stood face to face with his future slayer.

There is little need to repeat here the details of Rain-in-the-Face's captivity. It is interesting, but not of the story. He received visits from great warriors representing various tribes of the Sioux nation—Brulé, Yankton, Teton, Ogallala—all uniting to honor him. To the surprise of the few white spectators, these visitors kissed the young captive on the cheek, a mark of respect and affection almost unheard of among this savage people. Two of the younger warriors asked and received permission to share his captivity for a time. Rain-in-the-Face bore the imprisonment well; was docile, friendly, apparently happy. He had many talks with General Custer, and came to be well liked.

But he had much leisure for thought, and he was a proud man.

After some months, two white men, grain thieves, were placed in the same guard house. Being enterprising pioneers, they promptly sawed a hole and escaped. Rain-in-the-Face availed himself of the opening.

Once under the open sky, he adjusted his moccasins and struck boldly across the prairie for the West. Rain-in-the-Face was no longer an agency Indian, but a hostile.

IX

THE BROTHER OF GODS

Rain-in-the-face had no very definite idea of where he should go. The main and pressing need was to put a certain distance between himself and his pursuers as rapidly as possible.

To this end, he pushed diligently north-west in a bee line. At first he covered his trail skilfully, so that Custer's men would have to guess his direction of flight as any one of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the complete circle. After a little, this was unnecessary. It became desirable to fall in with a camp of the Sioux, in order that he might be directed to his own tribe of that people, the Uncpapa.

But as day followed day, Rain-in-the-Face owned himself puzzled. In the space of time that had elapsed since his escape, he should have encountered a dozen bands, for he was intimately acquainted with the country and with the Indian habit of life. The village sites were deserted, the plains were empty. The Indian did not know of the two expeditions, commanded respectively by Crook and Terry, which, the one from the south and the other from the north, were converging at the Big Horn; nor that in that district nearly every plains Indian had encamped, either openly allied with Sitting Bull, or near enough to become so should such a move seem expedient.

So for a week he subsisted alone as only an Indian can.

Let loose a tired pony at night on the plains, and in the morning he will turn up well fed and full of vigor. It is the same with a savage. He knows expedients for getting food, for preparing it, for combating thirst, for sleeping in bad weather with some degree of comfort, which a white man never acquires without a long and hazardous apprenticeship. It is a case of the survival of the fittest; and the Indian always survives.

Toward the end of the week, Rain-in-the-Face drew near the low hills of the Cheyenne River, in good condition, except that his moccasins were nearly worn out. Then he became aware of a camp. As beseemed a good warrior, he scouted carefully until he had satisfied himself that the lodges were those of people of his own nation. Then he allowed himself to be captured by the herd boys and escorted to Lone Wolf, the chief of the band.

Lone Wolf had been easily persuaded by Lafond that it was not good policy to join Sitting Bull. The tribe was well fed and rich. It could gain nothing by such a war, and could lose much. Now was the time to prepare against the coming winter; now, in the early summer, when the energy of the band was at its flood. War it had enjoyed but recently with the Pawnees; so the hearts of the young men were big with valor. Let them equally enjoy the chase, the other branch of a brave's education.

These, and a hundred like reasons, Lafond had urged so plausibly that the chief had come, without difficulty, to his way of thinking. After all, why not at least await the plum season, and the great gathering of prairie chickens which was invariably consequent on the ripening of the fruit? With that plan in view, the warrior had moved his band and all its household goods to the banks of the Cheyenne, where he settled down peaceably to a season of plenty. There Rain-in-the-Face found him.

The camp had been pitched, after the usual rambling manner, in a broad grass park of sandy subsoil, below hills on which wandered the ponies in times of safety, or lurked the sentinels in time of danger. Above the lodges, like blazoned arms, were suspended the spears and shields of the warriors, and before the open flap of each the owner could be seen sprawled in dignified idleness among his favorite squaws. Children sat grave and silent near at hand, or whirled in mimic and noisy warfare farther out over the prairie. Dogs skulked here and there. Kettles above shallow fire holes bubbled and steamed. About over the ground was strewn the indescribable litter of a long-used camp. Through the early summer air rose shrill laughter, the sounds of good-natured chaff, the yelp of dogs and the hum of lower conversation; for, no matter how shy or stoical an Indian may seem before strangers, he is sociable enough among his own people. Near the centre of the village stood the lodge of Lone Wolf. At his hand sat Michaïl Lafond.

The half-breed had in the past two years reverted almost to the type of his more savage parent. His hair was long and worn loose, after the Sioux fashion. The upper part of his body was naked. About his neck hung a string of bears' claws. Paint streaked his countenance. White buckskin leggings, ornamented with beads, covered his legs. Only the shifty character of his eye and a certain finer modelling of the bold lines of his face differentiated him from the full-blooded Sioux at his side. The two were conversing in the Sioux language.

To them the boys brought their stranger. From various directions squaws and children sidled nearer for a look. The warriors, disdaining such an exhibition of womanish curiosity, remained placidly smoking in the sunshine. Near at hand the sounds of laughter and of conversation died, and the solemnity of ceremony fell.

As he approached, the stranger raised his right hand, palm forward, in token of peace, and then drew the edge of the same hand across his throat from left to right. This latter is the "sign" of the Sioux, and thus Lone Wolf was made aware that he received one of his own nation. Lone Wolf inclined slightly, and raised his hand with the peace gesture. The three then sat and the inevitable pipe was produced.

Thus Rain-in-the-Face was received with all ceremony. Later, the first dip into the kettle of boiling meat was conceded him, and in that manner he was made free of Lone Wolf's lodge. No question was asked as to his identity, and he vouchsafed no information; that would come later, when the warriors gathered for a formal powwow.

And in the meantime, Michaïl Lafond's roving French eyes took in every detail of the stranger's appearance, and his keen French mind drew its own conclusions. Near the close of the afternoon, he left his seat and addressed the stranger.

"My brother knows ponies," said he. "Will he look upon one of mine?"

It was equivalent to an invitation to call. The savage arose and stalked by the half-breed's side in the direction of Lafond's fine lodge of whitened skins. As they approached, two young squaws glided away. Lafond spoke a word to one of them, and a moment later the boys of the camp raced eagerly in the direction of the band of ponies on the hill.

THAT BABY CRY, "MAMA!"

The lodge of Michaïl Lafond stood just beyond the village proper and on a slight elevation. The entire camp lay spread out before it, a panorama to be seized by a single sweep of the eye.

The savage paused for a moment before entering the doorway, and looked about him with a little envy. Never had he visited a band so well supplied with ponies, so efficiently armed, so wealthy in robes and lodges and kettles and all the other articles of Indian wealth which go to make up prosperity. Lafond watched him closely. The Indian turned inside the doorway, and sat down on a heavily furred buffalo skin near the entrance. In the background wallowed a dim confusion of skins, robes, and utensils. Lafond placed himself beside his guest and the pipe was lighted.

The stir following the stranger's arrival had lulled. The women and children, having satisfied their curiosity as to his personal appearance, returned to their wonted occupations, so that once again the mingled noises of the camp rose from the little valley.

In a moment the young squaw led up a pony. The animal was fine above the average. Its limbs were deer-like in delicacy, its nostrils were wide, its neck slender and tapering—quite in contrast to the ordinary Indian pony's clumsiness in this respect—and, above all, it was marked black and white in the pinto fashion. This last is considered to indicate superior spirit and is much prized. The woman had twisted pieces of bright-colored cloth and eagle feathers into the mane and tail.

At the sight of so beautiful an animal, the stranger exclaimed in delight.

"It pleases my brother?" inquired Lafond politely. "It is his."

The squaw led the beast forward, touching the young warrior's hand with the end of the halter in token of proprietorship. Lafond rose and closed the tent flap. The noises of the camp were at once muffled, and twilight fell.

"My brother is a great warrior," he began after a moment, "yet he has need of ponies, for he comes on foot and his moccasins are worn."

The stranger, impassive but watchful, made no answer.

"My brother has come far?" went on Lafond cunningly.

"Far," repeated the youth politely.

"His eyes have seen the waters of the Great River?"

The savage bowed.

"Perhaps his pony was lost there?"

"It may be."

"The sight of the white man frightened him and he was drowned?"

The Indian's eyes flashed.

"It may be so."

"On his back my brother bears great scars," said Lafond suddenly after a short pause; "but they are the scars of a brave man. He bears other scars on his face; they are the scars of shame."

He ceased abruptly at the stranger's fierce ejaculation. The Indian seemed about to spring on him.

"But," the half-breed went on in haste, "my brother will destroy the shame, and the scars will go." He leaned forward and touched the savage lightly on his bare shoulder. "They are the scars from the white man's prison," he said.

For a moment the stranger's face was a study in livid hate. Then all expression died from it, leaving it stolid as before.

The half-breed smoked in silence. His surmises had been correct. This was indeed the young hero of the sun dance, the news of whose imprisonment had, by chance, come to his ears but a short time before. He considered. Finally, he turned to his guest once more.

"My brother has travelled many miles," he said. "Tell me, has he seen the lodges of his people?"

"The prairies have been waste."

"I will tell you why. The great white war chief has gone with his young men beyond Pah-sap-pah. There the warriors will strike him and destroy him. My brother's people are there."

The hate came back into the Indian's face with a flash. He fingered the haft of a knife that lay near his hand.

"I will join my people," he said.

"And aid them. It is well. But will my brother go alone and without arms?"

"What would you?" replied the Indian bitterly. "Am I a chief that I should go attended? Do arrows and rifles grow on the prairies?"

The half-breed craftily permitted another impressive but momentary silence to fall.

"But if my brother were to ride with a hundred fighting men; on his own pony; with a rifle in his hand—would not that be more in accord with his dignity as a brave warrior?" he suggested suddenly.

"Where are a hundred such?"

Lafond arose and pulled aside the flap of the tent. The camp lay in the half glow as a flat picture, and its noise burst in through the open doorway like a blare of music. The Indian's expressive eyes flashed comprehension.

"And if they go?" he asked.

"I, too, have enemies," replied Lafond.

Rain-in-the-Face smoked meditatively. If this man held the power to sway thus the policy of the camp, why did he not use it to crush the enemies of whom he had spoken? What added force could a young, unarmed stranger bring him that would compensate for the trouble and expense to which he was putting himself?

Lafond saw the hesitation and dreaded aright.

"My enemies dwell in Pah-sap-pah," said he simply.

In that sentence he exposed the weakness of his position. Pah-sap-pah was sacred, so sacred that for many years miners fled to it as to a sanctuary, certain that once within its dark border pursuit would cease. Hunts in it were undertaken only at certain times of the year, and under peculiar auspices. War died into peace when it dashed against those sombre cliffs. The winds in the trees were voices of Soulless Ones, bewailing always their fate; the frown of sun-red Harney—or the peak afterward known under that name—was instinct with the brooding wrath of some great manitou, who slept lightly only when his children disturbed him not. Even the powerful influence of Michaïl Lafond had failed to induce Lone Wolf to enter the Black Hills on an errand of murder.

But the name of Rain-in-the-Face was one to conjure with in just such matters as these. He was not only a brave man and a great warrior, but he was favored of the gods. In the belief of the Sioux nation, his wonderful endurance in the sun dance was at once evidence and warranty of it. Without divine favor he could not have endured so long; enduring so long had brought to him great abundance of divine favor. So, without actually professing to be a medicine man, he had freely accorded to him all the confidence a member of the priestcraft usually enjoys. If Lafond could induce Rain-in-the-Face to lead, the warriors of the band would follow blindly, even into Pah-sap-pah itself.

The Indian started as he caught the import of Lafond's words.

"My brother has looked upon the face of the angry Manitou," went on Lafond eagerly; "and he has not been afraid. He has danced the dance of death, and the great Manitou has stretched out his hand and held him up. My brother is favored of the Great Spirit, and he is not afraid."

"It is Pah-sap-pah," replied the Indian sombrely.

"Yes, it is Pah-sap-pah, and Pah-sap-pah is sacred. In Pah-sap-pah are two men, and they go here and there breaking her rocks, cutting her trees, defiling her streams. They profane the spirits. On the clouds of the mountain Gitche Manitou frowns because his children permit it. 'Why comes not one to take these away?' he says. 'My children have forgotten me.'"

"Gitche Manitou is great," said Rain-in-the-Face thoughtfully. "Why does he not destroy his enemies?"

"Gitche Manitou destroys through his chosen. Destroy thou, and it will be Gitche Manitou who destroys through thy hand."

The wily half-breed had caught this doctrine of the Jesuit in his old north country home, and his crafty use of it impressed its force strongly on the savage's mind. Lafond proceeded—

"And who more fitted than Rain-in-the-Face?"

The Indian glanced at him with new respect at this knowledge of his name.

"For he stands near to the Great Spirit, and the warriors will follow him."

The half-breed paused, pretending to consider the difficulties.

"The men are but two and there is a woman. There are here a hundred warriors, and each warrior has a gun and much powder. When the profane ones have been destroyed, then Rain-in-the-Face will turn northward and enter the camp of Sitting Bull at the head of many fighting men. It little beseems so great a warrior of the Uncpapas to go begging a rifle from the Tetons!"

The mind of Rain-in-the-Face, thus relieved of some degree of its superstitious fear, lay fully open to this last appeal to his pride. He picked up the pipe and puffed stolidly on it twice.

"The enemies of my brother shall die," said he.

Before the formal conference of that evening, Michaïl Lafond had arranged to carry out his side of the bargain. He had done this very simply. After the conversation in the lodge he had gone to Lone Wolf.

"The stranger is Rain-in-the-Face, of the Uncpapas," said he. "He is pleased with our warriors and he wishes to lead them against the great white war chief near the Big Horn. There are also strangers in Pah-sap-pah whom it is the will of Gitche Manitou that Rain-in-the-Face should destroy, and he desires your help."

Lone Wolf was delighted. That so famous a warrior should choose his band was honor enough to repay any effort.

In all this transaction, the offices of Michaïl Lafond could easily have been dispensed with. If Lone Wolf had gone to Rain-in-the-Face and said, "Behold, here are my young men. Lead them," the latter would have accepted the tender with joy. If, on the other hand, the stranger had merely announced his identity to Lone Wolf, that chieftain would gladly have furnished him with everything he needed. But each was in the dark as to one fact, of which Lafond had knowledge. Rain-in-the-Face did not suspect how his imprisonment had increased his importance, nor did he know that the deep content which brooded over Lone Wolf's camp was only apparent, and had been carefully fostered by Lafond. Nor did Lone Wolf recognize Rain-in-the-Face, nor realize how anxious the youth was for an escort to uphold his pride. It was by seeing little things of this sort, and acting upon them, that the half-breed had gained so much influence.

Four days later, Lone Wolf's camp swept northwestward toward the Big Horn Mountain. On the 25th of June, Rain-in-the-Face confronted General Custer, on a knoll near the river of the Little Big Horn. A great battle was all but over, and the few remaining troopers, their last cartridges gone, were fighting desperately with sabres.

The savage shot the white man through the heart.

X

THE PRICE OF A CLAIM

All through this time of dread and danger, of plot and counterplot and intrigue, of brooding war and half-awakened pillage, the doctor went on peacefully collecting his funny little statistics, utterly oblivious to everything but their accumulation and arrangement. Every morning of the warmer months he went out into the hills for the day. There he would grub about among his ledges and leads, pecking away at the rocks with his little hand pick, filling his canvas bags, jotting down notes and statistics in his notebook.

During its progress he was blind to everything but his work. One day, as he walked along the top of a ridge, a huge bear rose up in his path. The doctor politely lifted his hat and passed to one side. The decline of the sun alone he noticed. When the shadow of Harney crept out to him he turned toward home. As he neared the log cabin his placid eyes fairly beamed through his spectacles. When he came in sight of it he ran forward, his specimen bags swinging heavily against his legs, caught up the child stumbling to meet him and carried her, laughing and struggling, to the woman in the doorway. Then they had supper all together—bacon, or perhaps game, with vegetables from the garden, and corn bread. Occasionally they had white bread and coffee, and always fresh water from the cold mountain creek. After supper the doctor went outdoors to arrange his specimens and plot out his notes as long as the daylight lasted. His wife moved about inside softly. After a time she brought out the little girl in her nightdress to be kissed. So the twilight neared, and the long day was done.

As the yellow glow crept down, she came outdoors too, and sat pensively looking over the peaks of the lower mountains to the distant Cheyenne and the prairies. Beyond them was the East. There were cities and books and other women and the beat of human life in the air. Here was a still, lonely grandeur that even the wind in the pines did not relieve.

The doctor finally had to put aside his work for lack of light, and sat at her feet leaning against the logs of the cabin. She looked down on his little figure, his round shoulders, his forehead even now abstract and wrinkled with speculation, his kindly blue eyes, his sensitive mouth, and then she softly reached out and took his hand. The two sat there until the moon rose over the Bad Lands. Then they went inside. In moments such as this the woman lived.

In winter time the doctor sat near the fireplace, writing by the candlelight on his great book. She was in the shadow, looking at him with tenderness, smiling wearily at the eager quivering of his chin, and rocking gently back and forth. The little girl played demurely on the floor within the circle of firelight, her curls falling down on her forehead. She piled up her blocks, and occasionally, as one would fall, she would look up in deprecation of her mother's hush. The golden heads of the mother and child were like sunshine before the dark walls of the cabin. Against them the firelight gleamed. Outside, the thin, light snow drifted fitfully by the pane. The doctor wrote. The woman watched in patience. The child played.

As spring came on, the doctor got out into the hills again.

One day he came back and found the woman murdered and the child gone. The cabin was ransacked from one end to the other, but no attempt had been made to fire it.

The doctor put his specimen bags methodically in their places, and then sat down by his dead wife.

At evening some passing miners found him there holding her hand. With some difficulty, and by the exercise of a gentle force, they persuaded him to rise, after which they tenderly laid the body on a couch, concealing as best they might the red tonsure where the scalp had been. They set the cabin in order and cooked supper from the provisions in their wagon. The doctor ate and drank in silence, making no sign when the men spoke to him.

After supper he went outside and began to arrange his specimens. When darkness fell he came in, stood undecided for a moment, and then lay down on a bear-skin, Jim's gift, and slept.

The men looked at one another in a puzzled way, conversing in low tones. Soon they too rolled themselves up and went to sleep on the floor.

Early in the morning Jim Buckley came down the gulch with part of a deer. The men told him the news hurriedly, between mouthfuls of coffee. Jim looked at the dead woman with a hardening of the mouth and a softening of the eyes; then he went out and for the first time took the doctor's hand.

When they had finished breakfast, the men made a rough bier of willow branches plaited, on which they gently laid the body. Two went down to the soft earth by the creek bottom and began to dig. The others followed with their burden, which they laid beside the growing excavation, and then stood with bared heads, waiting for the diggers. The doctor would not come. After a little persuasion they left him sitting on the ground, leaning against the logs of the cabin, looking out over the bluffs of the Cheyenne to the east.

The men in the trench worked rapidly and skilfully, one loosening the gravel with his pick, the other shovelling it out on the grass. Suddenly the latter stopped in the act of tossing a shovelful. He pushed his stubby forefinger in among the gravel for a moment and drew out an irregular bit of metal. It was gold.

They buried the young wife elsewhere, and staked out the claim, and others, lying along the creek.

So Prue slept quietly at last. Her little life was drab-colored in spite of the lights of adventure and drama that had played over it. It contained a great love and a great sacrifice. So little of the gold would have made her happy, and yet all the wealth of these new placers could not have saved her at the last!

A rider dashed up to them at the cabin, bringing news of the outbreak. It was directed to the towns of the North, and had only brushed Spanish Gulch on its destroying way. The men camped on the site of the new placer. They built cradles and pumped water down from Spanish Creek, so that in a little time the gulch contained quite a town. The first discovery is known as the Doctor's Claim, and so you can find it recorded in the records of Pennington County to-day. It turned out to be very rich.

And as for the doctor—he died.

XI

THE BEGINNING OF LAFOND'S REVENGE

The day following the conference, Lone Wolf struck camp. The squaws quickly removed and rolled into convenient bundles the skin coverings of the tepees. The poles of the latter were strapped on each side of the ponies in such a manner that, their ends dragging on the ground, a sort of litter was formed for the transportation of the household goods and the younger children. Before the sun was an hour high, the caravan was under way.

From this, the South Fork of the Cheyenne, the main band, under Lone Wolf, were to push directly through to the Big Horn. Lafond, Rain-in-the-Face, and the warriors detailed for the expedition were to carry out the adventure of Pah-sap-pah to the half-breed's satisfaction, and were then to rejoin the main body as soon as possible.

The smaller band cut in to the Black Hills shortly after daybreak one morning. It rode up Spanish Gulch a little before noon.

Most of these warriors had never before entered the dark limits of Pah-sap-pah. They were plainly in awe of its frowning cliffs and rustling pines. They rode close together, whispering uneasily. Even Rain-in-the-Face failed to reassure them. Why should he? He was a little afraid himself.

Lafond's knowledge of the topography of the place was excellent. He had visited it several times. He had watched the doctor, step by step, throughout a long day of geological searching. He knew Jim Buckley's dwelling, where he worked, what hours he kept, and just how late he sat up at night. Innumerable times he had viewed the doctor, Prue, and the scout through the buck-horn sights of his long rifle; yet he had never been even tempted to pull the trigger. Why? Because he was a Latin, and so theatrical effects were dear to him; because he was an Indian, and so revenge with him seemed to lie not so much in the mere infliction of injury as in the victim's realization that he was being come up with. Lafond not only wanted the doctor and his companions to be killed, but he wanted them to know why they were killed, and by whom. It was finer to be able thus to do the thing with all the stage settings. The dramatic instinct was part of the barbaric quality of his nature, like a love for red.

So Lafond had let slip innumerable opportunities of picking off his victims single-handed, merely to gain the local knowledge necessary to a final coup de théâtre. Consequently, he knew where the cabin was situated, and quickly scouted the state of affairs. The coast was clear. He gave the required signal; the savages silently approached on foot, and they entered the little house together.

Now at this time of year, in the Black Hills, there occurs a daily meteorological phenomenon of a rather peculiar character. The hot air from the prairies sweeps over from the Missouri River, crossing a number of lesser streams in its passage, until it strikes the slope of the hills. There it is deflected upward, gradually becoming colder as the elevation rises, until, at the barrier of Harney, it gathers in rain clouds. These are at first mere wisps of down, streaming in ragged ribbons from the peak; but with incredible rapidity they gain in density and extent, until they spread over a considerable area of the surrounding country. Then they empty themselves in a terrific deluge of water and hail, accompanied by thunderclaps so reverberant that they seem to arise from the rending of the hills themselves. After this short crisis, the dismembered clouds float out over the prairie and are dissipated in the hot air, even before they reach the first white turrets of the Bad Lands.

So rapidly does the storm gather and break, that there is but a short half hour between the morning and the afternoon clearness of the skies. To those who have never experienced this phenomenon, it is startling in the extreme; to those who have, it is a matter of seeking temporary shelter until the disturbance blows over. In any case, the first indications are but scant warning.

By the time the little band of Indians had reached the doctor's cabin, the first wisps of cloud were clinging to Harney. While they were in the house, the blackness gathered and loomed and darkened until the sun was obscured and the western hills lost themselves in rain.

The doctor was in the hills. Prue was making the bed in the little bedroom, and little Miss Prue was asleep on a rug in one corner of the larger apartment. The savages stole in with noiseless, moccasined feet behind the stooping woman. Lafond, forgetting in his excitement everything but the lust of killing, stabbed her deeply twice in the broad of the back. She fell forward on the bed without a murmur, and the murderer, seizing the knob of her hair, circled her brow with his knife's edge, and ripped loose the scalp. Then they all glided back into the other room.

Three of the savages took from the wood box near the crude fireplace some of the dried kindling with which Jim Buckley had supplied the family, and began to build a little wigwam-shaped pyramid against the side of the wall. Others moved about furtively, prying here and there for possible plunder. They preserved absolute silence, for the superstitious terror of the place was working on them, and they had begun to experience that panic-like tremor which seems to create an invisible clutch ready to seize from behind.

Even the encouraging presence of Rain-in-the-Face was not potent enough to prevent this. Out on the plains the personality of the man had loomed large, but here the legend was greater than he. The warriors felt the imminence of the frowning, brooding manitou of Harney; they almost heard the moaned syllables of the Soulless Ones' complaint. Their movements were those of timid mice, advancing a little, hesitating much, ready to flee in panic.

Not so Lafond. He strode roughly over to the corner where the child lay. In his mind, with new vividness, burned that old picture of his humiliation. He began to realize, now that the patient repression of his hate was over, how potent it had been. Alfred and Billy Knapp were out of his reach for the present, but here were the others ready to his hand. He seized little Prue by the hair of her head.

The child, thus suddenly awakened, screamed violently, shriek upon shriek, as her terror became more fully conscious of the savage and his bloody knife. About the room the warriors paused nervously. Accustomed enough to screams of this sort, they were now dominated by superstition and were thrown off their wonted balance.

And then a fearful thing occurred. Before their eyes, in the open door, groped and staggered the woman Lafond had stabbed but a moment before. From the red raw surface of her scalp blood streamed—streamed over the remaining fringe of her hair, matting it down; streamed down into her eyes, blinding them; over her drawn countenance; over the dabbled, sticky, clinging fabric of her garment, reddened still more by the pulsing flood from the two great wounds in her body. Her breast heaved painfully, the breath coming and going with a strange bubbling gurgle. Her face was turned upward almost to the ceiling above in the agony of her endeavor. Her little hands, become waxen, clutched and unclutched the side of the door. The child screamed yet again, mercifully hidden from this awful sight by the intervention of Lafond's body. The woman made a supreme effort to advance, plunged forward, and rolled over and over on the cabin floor.

At the same instant, with a shriek of wind and a roar of rain, the voice of the thunder spoke.

The savages, who had watched with strained eyes this resurrection from the dead, yelled in an ecstasy of superstitious terror and rushed for the door.

Lafond, utterly unmoved, called to them in Indian and swore at them in French, but they were gone. He hesitated for a moment in evident indecision as to what should be done next. Then he rapidly bundled the little girl in a blanket and threw her across his shoulder. As he hurried to the door, he paused for a moment over the motionless heap of blood and rags on the floor, coolly thrusting his knife again and again into the unresisting flesh.

He caught the fugitives only below the cañon of Iron Creek. They had made no pause until well out of the hills, and were still shaking with superstitious dread. Even Rain-in-the-Face, bold and self-confident as he was, had yielded to the panic; nor could the persuasions, threats or ridicule of the half-breed induce them to return.

For a time Lafond was of two minds as to his own course in the matter. Should he leave things as they were for the present or should he return alone to complete the work? Finally he decided on the former. The Gallic love of the spectacular again intervened; besides, he was possessed of a certain large feeling that the world was not wide enough to save his victims from him when he should judge the time fit. He found much joy in gloating over what he imagined the two men would say, do, and think when they returned to the cabin. And he was a good deal of a savage. He looked forward with fierce delight to the great battle which he foresaw would soon take place between Sitting Bull and his white enemies. So he rode on with the little band of warriors to overtake Lone Wolf.

The savages plainly could not understand his encumbering himself with the child. The custom had always been to seize such a victim by the ankles, whirl it once about the head to get a good swing, and then to dash its skull violently against a bowlder. They saw no reason why the rule should be departed from in this case. Neither did Lafond; but the queer, zigzag intuition of the half-breed had caused him to feel dimly that he should preserve the child, and as he was in the habit of gratifying his whims, he proceeded to carry out his intention in this case. Once his decision was expressed in emphatic form, his companions acquiesced. The child was Michaïl's captive; with his own captive he could work his will. That is the Indian code.

So little Miss Prue was carried for seven days on the back of a horse. She did not cry much, and this saved her from violence. Her two years of outdoor life had made her constitution robust, and this helped her in inevitable privation. At the end of the week, the band caught up with Lone Wolf and his camp, and Miss Prue was given over into the care of Lafond's two young squaws. With them she underwent the customary two days' jealousy, and then entered fully into the heritage of kindliness which every Indian woman squeezes, drop by drop, from her arid life and lavishes on the creatures who are gentle with her.

She had, to be sure, to learn the Indian virtues of silence and obedience. She had to do the little tasks that are set to girl babies everywhere among the savage tribes. And, above all, she had to learn to endure. But, in recompense, the two Indian women adored her. They decked her out in beaded work and white buckskin; they put bright feathers in her hair and bright beads about her little neck; they saved choice bits for her from the family kettle; and when night came they lay on either side of her and softly stroked her hair as she slept. Over her head, among others, hung her mother's scalp.

XII

THE LEOPARD AND HIS SPOTS

It is not the purpose of this story to describe the battle of the Little Big Horn in detail. That has been done many times. There is little about it that is remarkable, excepting always the heroism of the men who fought so desperately. The scene itself must have been impressive, as viewed by the non-combatants of the Indians from the bluffs near at hand—the swirl of brown about the melting patch of blue. After Custer fell, the savages turned eagerly down the valley to attack Reno, leaving the dead as they lay. Lafond did not accompany them. The sight had aroused certain reflections in his breast, and he wished to work the thing out.

After sunset, he went alone and on foot over to the battlefield. The troopers lay as they had fallen—first, Calhoun's company in line, with its officers in place; then Keogh's; finally, on the knoll, the remnant, scattered irregularly among the dead of their enemies. In the cold light their faces shone white and still, even yet instinct with the eagerness of battle; an eagerness which death had transmuted from flesh to marble. Near the centre lay Custer, his long yellow hair framing his face, his hands crossed on his breast. He alone was unmutilated, save by the shot that had taken his life.

The half-breed did not hesitate on the outer circle of the combat, but picked his way among the corpses until he stood on the summit of the little knoll. Then he folded his arms and looked steadily down on the white man's inscrutable face.

Whatever might be Lafond's intellectual or moral deficiencies, lack of perspicacity was not among them. Through the red glory of this apparent victory, the most sweeping ever accomplished by the plains Indians, he saw clearly the imminence of final defeat. The dead man before him lay smiling, and Lafond perceived that he smiled because he saw his people arising to avenge him. The beat of the muster drum calling the avengers to the frontier now sounded in prophecy to his hearing, and the echoes of the last battle shot merged into the clang of an iron civilization, which was destined to push these exulting victors dispassionately aside. It was a striking picture of light and of shadow—this dark, savage figure silhouetted against the softened brightness of the sky, this bright-haired warrior lying bathed in the glorification of a Western night; the white man humiliated, defeated, slain, but seeing with closed eyes that at which he smiled with deep content; the savage, proud in success, triumphant, victor, but perceiving somehow, in the very evidences of his achievement, that which made him knit his brows. How little was this great victory against the background of the people whom it had outraged, and yet how mightily it would stir that people when once it became known!

Michaïl Lafond the savage stood before the body of Custer the fallen, for an hour, moving not one muscle all the time. At the end of the hour Michaïl Lafond the civilized turned slowly away, and walked thoughtfully toward the lodges on the other bank of the Little Big Horn River. The sight of a brave man, who had died as he lived, had reformed Lafond, but whether moralists would have approved of the reformation is to be doubted.

The night ran well along toward morning. The squaws, who had been plundering and mutilating the dead, had long since returned to hear the report of the warriors who had gone to attack Reno. The attack had failed, but the fight had been desperate and the losses on both sides heavy. Six of Custer's command, captured alive, were burned to death. At last, the entire camp, with the exception of the women sentinels, had gone to rest. Toward daybreak, even these became drowsy.

Lafond arose quietly. He gathered a few necessaries into a pack, placed them outside the doorway of the lodge, hesitated a moment, and then returned. His two squaws slept, as usual, one each side of the little girl. Lafond lifted the child carefully in order that he might not awaken her guardians or herself, and wrapped her closely in his blanket. At the doorway he again hesitated. Then, chuckling grimly, he deposited the child by the bundle he had already prepared, and returning, took down from the tent pole the string of scalps which went to show how successful and how savage a warrior he had been. By the light of the stars he selected one of these and laid it carefully between the two sleeping women. It was the scalp of the little girl's mother. Then he rehung the string on the tent pole, and went outside immensely pleased with his bit of humor.

It was his good-by to the wild life. From that time on he dwelt in the towns, where in a very few years his name became known as standing for a shrewdness in management, a keenness in seizing opportunities, and an inflexibility of purpose rarely to be met with among his Anglo-Saxon competitors. His present objective point, however, was the Spotted Tail Agency, which was, from the valley of the Little Big Horn, an affair of five days. Michaïl Lafond did it in four; or at least at the end of the fourth he was within a few miles of the agency buildings. By the evening of the third day, he had transformed both himself and the little girl into an appearance of civilization, reclothing her in the garments she had worn at the time of her capture, and himself in a complete outfit which he had collected piece by piece on that last night with the savages. The change was truly astonishing.

His last camp in the open was pitched within sight of the Spotted Tail reservation. The darkness was almost at hand. He had fed himself and the child, had put the latter to rest under one blanket and was just about to wrap himself in the other, when he became aware of a prairie schooner swaying leisurely across the plains in his direction. He at once sat up again. Every man was to him an object of suspicion.

Not until the wagon had halted within a few feet of him could he distinguish the occupant. Then he perceived that the latter was a gentle-faced, silver-haired individual of mild aspect, dressed decently but strangely, and possessed of introspective blue eyes, which he turned dreamily on Lafond.

"May I camp here?" he inquired deprecatingly.

The half-breed considered.

"I s'pose so," he said without enthusiasm.

The old man descended and uncoupled his two animals. After he had picketed them, he returned, and, extracting from the wagon body the materials for a meal, he proceeded to make himself at home over Lafond's fire.

"I never did like to camp alone," he confided to the latter.

Lafond watched him intently. No further words were exchanged until the stranger had finished his supper and had restored his kit to the wagon. Then the younger man offered the hospitality of the plains.

"Yo' smok'?" he inquired, tendering his tobacco.

"Thank you, no," replied the old man with a tone of breeding which Lafond felt but could not define.

The half-breed could not make out the newcomer, and the conversation failed to enlighten him. That was an epoch when all the world turned to the West; but it was a practical world. There one might in time meet all sorts and conditions of men, from the English lord to the turbulent Fenian; from the New York exquisite fallen on hard times to the "bad man" who had never been east of the Mississippi. One never betrayed surprise at anything one might bring ashore from this flotsam and jetsam of the human race. But all these odds and ends were at least made of tough material, strong enough to run wherever a rapid current might dash them, capable of supporting hard knocks against one another or the obstructions in the way; while this placid old man seemed to Lafond like a crystal vessel, of rare quality, perhaps, but none the less fragile. At the last he asked bluntly, "What do you here?"

The old man fell silent for a minute or two and gazed into the coals of the dying fire.

"My name is Durand," he said at last, with an infinitude of sorrow in the tones of his voice. "I am an entomologist. I am here to get specimens—butterflies; but it is not here that I belong. My place is elsewhere, and that I know. But it is not in my country, and——" he broke off. Lafond looked on curiously, for the dreamy haze had faded from the speaker's eyes. "My friend," Durand went on, "there are times when one cares not to see the face of man except in the bosom of the great nature. I do not know that you understand that. It is with the bitterness of a wrong that such knowledge comes, and with it comes the hate of cities and of the things men do. Some men have had their will of me, and I am come to the wilderness. They called it revenge to drive me here."

"Revenge! But you still live!" repeated Lafond in wonder.

"And is it that you think the taking of life is revenge?" cried Durand, with sudden energy. "They who take their revenge in killing are actually the merciful ones, and they cheat no one but themselves."

"Yes?" asked Lafond, his soul in the question.

The other turned in surprise at his companion's vehemence. He saw a stolid; dark-skinned man gazing impassively into the fire.

"They are fools," went on Durand bitterly, after a moment; "just fools. These others were of more ingenuity; they knew what would hurt, what would avenge them better than the killing."

"I do not understand," said the half-breed, feeling his way slowly, for the fear of damming this flow of confidence. He looked away, for his eye glowed, though his voice was steady. "W'at is it? If one kills, if one takes that life, w'at is worse?"

"Worse, worse?" cried Durand, flinging his hands impotently upward. "A thousand things!" He suddenly became calm, and turned to Lafond with impressive forefinger. "Listen, my friend. Life is a little thing. Anyone can take it who has a gun, or a knife, or even a stone. But the true revenge is in finding out what it is that each man prizes the most, and then taking it from him. And that requires power! power! power!

"Few there are who have not something they prize more than life," he added gloomily. The fire died from his eye. He became once again the timid old butterfly hunter, pushing blindly out into the wilderness, wondering at himself for thus exposing an old wound to a chance passer; and yet perhaps feeling in some dim fashion—so inscrutable are the instincts of these half-childish natures—that in so doing he was following for a moment the lines of greater destinies than his own.

And certainly, long after the dipper had swung below the pole star, Lafond sat staring into the ashes of the fire, just as four days since he had stared into the ashes of a brave and chivalrous life. In his history there were the two crucial hours—one after the greatest battle of the plains; the other after a dozen sentences exchanged with a half-crazy old entomologist. From the potent reflections induced by these one hundred and twenty minutes it resulted that Michaïl Lafond became civilized and a seeker for wealth in the development of the young country. In wealth he saw power; in power the ability to give or take away.

The depriving each man of that which he prizes the most!

XIII

THE DISSOLVING VIEW

While things have gone on, we have conducted our business and returned each evening to our armchairs by the fire. There we have sat at ease and reviewed the world. Events have come to pass. Diplomats have quarrelled gravely over the wording of a document. From our evening papers we have gathered a languid interest in the controversy. Six months later we pick up the paper and find that the dispute is still going on. A German and an Englishman play a game of chess over the cable. This too is reported in our journal, and we follow its progress with attention through the weeks of its duration. Somebody agitates the establishment of a new industry in our native town. It will raise the value of our real estate, so we attend meetings for some months and talk about it, after which the industry is assured. Two years later it is in operation and we congratulate ourselves. Friends of our younger days marry; and before we know it their houses are noisy with the shoutings of children. Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas become fixed, often by the most trivial of circumstances. Africa means tangled forest; India, a jungle; Siberia, broad snow plains; all South America, a dripping stillness of tropical verdure; simply because somewhere, some time, a book or paper, the woodcut of a child's lesson, has so generalized them for us. Against these preconceived notions the events we read about are cast.

In very much this way the constant facts of the West have been to us the Indian and the buffalo. Before our eyes the Master Showman has held insistently this picture. Against the background of the occidental hills or the flat reach of the grass-nodding prairies has posed in solemn gravity the naked warrior, leaning from his pony upon his feather-bedecked lance; or, in the choking dust of its own progression, has lumbered heavily the buffalo myriad. These have seemed permanent—the man and the beast.

Then, before our protesting conservatism, the scene has dissolved in a mist of strange shapes and violent deeds, only to steady a moment later into a new picture. The mounted figure has disappeared, and in his place, against the glow of sunset, the sturdy form of the husbandman grasps the shaft of his plough, gazing past the tired horses, and brooding the slow thoughts of his calling. The last rays catch the sheen of grain—a sea of it—and shimmer lightly until they lose themselves in contrast with the square of ruddy light that marks the windows of a farmhouse.

This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little space of time the institutions of untold ages have been overthrown and new ones substituted for them.

Deadwood was founded in 1876. In 1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were utterly destroyed in the mid-winter fight at Wounded Knee. Between those dates, the Dakotas have manufactured at home an article of quite adequate civilization.

To be sure, the product is perhaps a little crude. Although enormous grain fields attest indubitably that the farmer has tamed the soil, equally enormous Indian reservations as indubitably dispute too sweeping an assertion of it. Electric railways may be instanced in some towns. The sprightly six-shooter is in others the quickest road to the longest journey. Hot Springs has a modern hotel and an improved bar; a scant thirty miles north is the unsheriffed log-mining camp where the "bad man" terrorizes in all his glory.

These things are true, but they count for little. The great facts remain, and they are these: a cowboy named Tenney tried to lasso the last buffalo some years since and got himself yanked over several irregular miles of country; the Sioux are herded nicely on their reservations and shoot at nickels with bows and arrows for the amusement of passing tourists. The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.

This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. The folders show a map with the usual blood-red artery of mathematical straightness, passing through myriads of small-type towns, clinging desperately by their noses to the blessings of commerce, and sundry dignified, large-type cities, standing more aloof on their own merits. It all looks imposing enough on paper; but in reality the line does little more than keep itself warm in the narrow valley of its route. On closer inspection the myriads of towns disappear. Minnekahta is a station in the midst of a vast plain, Pringles a sawmill, Stony Point just nothing at all. For the Black Hills are great of extent, and one county of the Dakotas could swallow an eastern State.

All this, from border warfare to comparative order—say from Canute to Elizabeth—not in a thousand years, but in the brief age of a man-child growing out from his kindergarten into his college!

To one who has lived with the country, the process has been an education more thorough than that usually vouchsafed men. It has lacked in the graces and accomplishments, perhaps, but it has brought to the highest pitch the two qualities of self-reliance and of power of insight into men's characters. Whatever blunders a frontiersman may commit when visiting his neighbor cities in the East, they are never the bashful blunders of a countryman. Bunco men can clean him out in a gambling joint, but who ever heard of their selling him a gold brick? He has lived through all this hundreds of years ago, when Wild Bill was killed at Deadwood, or perhaps a century or so later, when, the year following, Alfred took the Caldwells to the Hills and was so nearly rushed by the Sioux. His life has been an epitome. He has met most conditions at one time or another, and is no longer afraid of them.

In a tale dealing with this period of the dissolving view—when in changing from one slide of the lantern to the other the Master Showman has permitted us a little glimpse of hurrying, heroic figures and dazzled us with the clouds of great deeds swiftly done—the teller must adopt one of two methods. He must either generalize, or be content to spend his space on single episodes. In that period, every day was a book. Men counted as nothing experiences filled with an excitement or a pathos or a beauty intense enough to render significant the whole life of a quiet New Englander. Acts were many, and trod close on one another's heels, yet to each act there was a sequence of motive, of desire, of logical effect, as well capable of being sought out and described as though they were not entangled and confused in the rush of the moments. The story teller could find his task in the dissection of these, and the task would be interesting. But to one who is concerned, not with a period, but a life, this is impossible.

The fifteen years saw a marked change in the fortunes of the half-breed known as Michaïl Lafond. During all that time he had led an apparently honest and law-abiding life. No man could say that he had been cheated by him or that he had been favored; but one and all with whom the half-breed had come into contact could speak with admiration and fear of the latter's power of seizing the best of the main chance. He had left the child at the Spotted Tail reservation, giving her name as Molly Lafond and making arrangements for her maintenance. He turned some gold claims to advantage, but abandoned that sort of thing as too uncertain. He participated mildly in the prosperity of several of the mushroom towns of the period, but soon drew out of booms as possessing also too much of the element of luck.

He did the hundreds of other things to which men in a new country can always turn their hands, and in each he made his profit; but in each he found something lacking to the elaborate scheme of power he had builded one evening before a prairie camp fire. Finally he hit upon whisky and dance halls and there he stayed. Abandoning all other enterprises, he gave his individual attention to these two, for he found in them not only the surest and largest monetary returns, but the certain popularity which men accord to those who minister to their pleasures. From Deadwood to Edgemont there gradually grew up a string of saloons bearing the name of Lafond. Some of them were paying, some on the point of paying, some merely lying latent for the boom which Lafond thought to see in the near future. For, as of old, he delighted in discounting the future. He liked long shots in his investments.

Over each of these various establishments their owner was in the habit of placing a man chosen according to the needs of the place, and this man fell more or less under Lafond's personal supervision according as the exigencies of the case seemed to demand it. The half-breed's policy was to keep in actual touch with the most prosperous, and to give personal effort to the most promising. The others could take care of themselves until their time came. So at Mulberry Gulch, where the camp consisted only of a number of grub stakers, he owned a little log cabin which he had never seen. At Deadwood, an old and prosperous camp, he was proprietor of a begilded and bemirrored splendor so well established that it needed only a periodical supervising visit to keep it running smoothly. At Copper Creek was also nothing but a log-cabin saloon; but Copper Creek bade fair to amount to something. Perhaps the spirit of the three kinds was best indicated by the signs over their counters. Mulberry Gulch exhibited a rudely lettered device informing the public, "Pies, Whisky and Pistols for Sail Here." Deadwood thirsty ones learned that they should "Ask for Our 1860 Old Crow; the Finest on Earth." Copper Creek sententiously remarked: "To Trust is Bust."

All this symbolized nothing more or less than the commercial history of a successful man in the West. It meant nothing except that Lafond had the instinct and the cleverness, and so was getting rich. More interesting than the change of his fortune was the change of the man himself.

In the old days he had been crafty in a subtle way; but he had been impulsive, eager, excitable, inclined to jump at the bidding of his intuitions. Now his character seemed to have expanded and modified. A powder explosion had slightly bent his straight figure, halted his gait, and seamed his face with powder marks. To hide these last, he wore a beard. The effect was one of quiet responsibility, and a certain geniality, though a keen observer might have hesitated to call this geniality kindly.

His manner was very quiet. He never reproved his subordinates or addressed a hasty word to anyone, unless he became thoroughly convinced of the culprit's incapacity. Then his anger was at white heat. He could forgive deliberate attempts to evade his commands or conscious efforts at rascality, for with them he could cope; but mistakes he never condoned. An occasional slight inversion of the natural order of words or phrases was all that remained to him of his old accent.

Altogether he was a personage whose public position was unexceptionable. In the West no man has a past, unless that past is personified and carries a rebuking six-shooter. He had wealth, popularity, an acquaintance as wide as the Hills themselves. All that meant power, especially when combined with a shrewd ability to read men's characters.

But of the old order one thing remained—his religion. In the storm and stress of a period hot with events, his life work was conceived and laid out. The lines of its plan had been seared into his soul by crime. He no longer felt the smart, but the cicatrix was there, and he daily bowed to its symbolism, often without a thought of what it really meant. His was like the future of a boy who has entered the army; his line of conduct was all prearranged, and his independence of it never occurred to him. There was no glowering hate in this; only a certain sense of inevitability. In other words, it was his religion.

"COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..."

Certain things were to be done. First of all he must become wealthy. Very well; wealthy he became. He must become popular. Agreed; he cultivated his fellow men. He must know how to read character and to hit upon weaknesses. Exactly; he bent his cleverness to the task. There was a larger end to which these three were but the means; but that would come later. Just now life meant quiet, earnest compassing of the three things. Until they were quite within his grasp, he could afford to shut into the background what their ultimate signification should be. Lafond lived tranquilly a perfectly moral existence.

But without his volition the great idea crystallized into some sort of shape. It was always in the background, to be sure; but, after all, a background fills the picture. That which men hold to be most dear! The years had taught him what it was, without his actually demanding it of them. Men hold most dear property, reputation, honor among their fellow men, and the love of women. Women hold most dear virtue and a good name.

About fifteen years after he had quitted the Indians, Lafond suddenly realized that he had gained the power and knew how to use it. Quite dispassionately he looked ahead to the next step.

There were Jim Buckley, Billy Knapp, Alfred and the doctor's family. The latter now included only the girl, whom Lafond had himself caused to be raised to young womanhood. Of the others, Jim Buckley and Alfred had long since left the country—Alfred for Arizona, where he had gone into cow punching; Buckley for Montana and Idaho, in whose mountains he was supposed to be prospecting. These two, then, were out of the way for the present. They would never be difficult to find, and in comparison with Billy they had held quite a secondary place at the time of the half-breed's molten state, before he had cooled into the fixed forms of his conduct of life.

The reason for this throws not a little light on Lafond's character. The feminine streak in him hated Billy Knapp personally, simply because that individual was loud in talk, great in size, and blustering in manner. He could restrain his resentment against the bashful Alfred or the imperturbable Jim; but not that against a man who seemed always, to the high strung half-breed, the potential bully. He would have followed Billy Knapp to China, if necessary.

But it so happened that that individual, after a checkered career, had settled down in the village or camp of Copper Creek, not forty miles from Lafond's headquarters at Rapid. Billy's vicissitudes were those of many of his class. Trained in the liberal give and take policy of the early frontier times, he found himself, on their ebb, stranded high and dry without appropriate means of progression. Billy was used to relying on his plainscraft, his courage, his skill with firearms, and his personal strength. Such qualities as economy, accuracy of estimate, frugality, and patience in the overcoming of abstractions would have been, to his early life, practically useless. He came to be a big-hearted, generous fellow, without the slightest idea of the value of money or the burden of debt. He was apt to be seized by many whims, which he was wont to gratify on the spot.

"Know Billy Knapp?" ruminated an old plainsman once. "Billy Knapp? Seems to me I do; he's the feller that would buy the co't house yonder if he could get trusted for it, ain't he?"

It described him. And as in the old days his prestige had depended on individual prowess of a rather spectacular order, it came about that Billy was just a little fond of strutting. He liked to play the patron, he liked to distribute favors, to treat to drinks, to stand as the representative of great unseen forces, whether of military power in the old days, or of extensive capital in these latter.

For a great many years this vanity had remained ungratified. Billy had not the virtues to succeed in the rising commercialism of the new West. After the last great campaign against the Sioux, he found his usual occupations almost wiped from the slate. The plains were as safe as Illinois. He picked up a livelihood still, mainly by reason of his wonderful gift of persuasion, for Billy could talk black white, if only the particular shade and the discussion were situated in the West. He drove stage, broke horses, bossed cattle outfits, and finally drifted into prospecting.

There his chance came. By a lucky stroke of trading he became possessed of some really good quartz claims and a small sum of ready cash. Two weeks later he was in Chicago. It was his first trip east of the Mississippi, but he knew just what he wanted, and he got it. Three days of Billy's golden oratory led to the purchase by an Eastern syndicate of an option on his group of claims, and the understanding that toward the middle of the following summer a committee of owners should visit the property in order to discuss ways and means of developing the various quartz leads.

The delighted Billy returned to Copper Creek. There at last he found himself the important figure he had always dreamed of being. He posed to himself and to everybody else. The camp gradually filled, and the claims round about were snapped up greedily.

Lafond had easily kept himself informed of all this. It was sufficiently notorious. Now when he came to a realization that the next move in his game of life was due and that he should put to its appointed use the power he had so long amassed, he decided to study Billy Knapp in order to see which of the four—property, reputation, honor or love—that volatile individual held most dear. He could make a shrewd guess, but he wanted to be on the ground. And as he thought about it, there came to him a great wave of enthusiasm and eagerness over this game he was about to play; a delight in the magnitude of the stakes and the power of the instruments employed, an intellectual glorying quite different and separated from his personal feelings in the matter, or that religious obligation of it which lay at the back of his soul.

XIV

INTO THE SHADOW OF THE HILLS

The first thing Michaïl Lafond did in pursuance of his new determination was to visit the Spotted Tail reservation in order to reclaim the girl henceforth to be known as Molly Lafond.

No one knows why he had followed out his first impulse to preserve her life and bring her up. After a time, however, she came to symbolize, in his half-mystical perception of such things, the first cause of all that had happened. Personally he liked her because she was such a free, independent, fiery little creature. He liked to talk to her and be ordered about by her. He liked also to watch the graceful, decisive movements of her lithe young body and the sparkle of her hair. She looked a good deal like her mother.

He even listened with what would appear to be close sympathy to her complaints of the agent's wife and the life to be led at a reservation. She and the agent's wife never did get on well. The latter was a stern, commonplace, fat woman without sympathy. And the life! There were no men, nothing but Indians. All you could do was to read all day and all the evening, or ride straight out in any given direction that led nowhere. Michaïl Lafond, in his semi-annual visits, was inclined to agree with her and even to pity her a little. His personal likings were on the surface, and had nothing whatever to do with the deeps of his nature.

Just as the surest way of satisfying his thirst for revenge upon Billy Knapp was to deprive the man of his reputation and his property, so he had determined to make of Molly a dance-hall girl, like Colorado Jenny. It would deprive her of virtue and good name, the things a woman holds most dear. He also felt keenly, in his instinctive dramatic sense, the fitness of throwing this fine-fibred daughter of a nobler race to the hungry passions, of watching her reversion little by little to the brute type; but a formulation of it never came to the surface of his mind. And yet, I must repeat, there was in one sense nothing personal in this. Lafond felt no aversion to the girl herself. He took no pleasure in the thought of cursing her or beating her, as might a man seeking a hotter revenge. It was just cold, malignant, calculating hate of something in opposition to him, which she symbolized.

This intellectual form of hatred is a peculiar characteristic of half-breeds.

When Lafond suggested to Molly that she should leave the agency and take up her residence with him in Copper Creek, she assented very gladly, for she felt her present life insupportable. The day before, she and Mrs. Sweeney, the agent's wife, had come into violent collision.

"Where was you yesterday afternoon?" Mrs. Sweeney had asked, as Molly came into the kitchen.

It was before breakfast, so Molly shrugged an impatient shoulder.

"Riding," she replied briefly.

"Riding where?" insisted Mrs. Sweeney with heavy persistency.

"Over west."

"See anybody?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"Yes."

The old lady wound her hands in her apron and fixed her charge severely with her eye.

"Strange how blind some folks is," she went on after a moment. "Now, I was indoors washing an' I see that young sergeant over there scoutin' 'round."

The words were simple; the tone was not.

"What do you mean?" cried Molly sharply. "Do you mean to say I was riding with him?"

Mrs. Sweeney wagged her head with aggravating sagacity.

"Nobody needn't put on no shoe that don't fit 'em," she said, and sighed with the air of a martyr who has discovered all and is disappointed.

Molly knew that her question had been justified by the woman's insinuation, that she had put on no shoe, and that if there were a martyr in the room it was not the agent's wife. Thereupon she said things excitedly. The agent's wife assumed an injured placidity, than which there is nothing more aggravating. Finally Molly flounced out of the room.

The agent's wife, being utterly in the wrong, sulked after the manner of women for the rest of the day, and had to be sued for forgiveness.

And yet next day, when Molly and the half-breed drove away, Mrs. Sweeney remembered that the girl had been with them nearly fifteen years, and wept; and the agent booted a trespassing Indian from his office with unwonted energy.

Molly, on the other hand, was as happy as a lark. Every man knows the thrill of anticipation when he stows the gun case under the seat and induces the pointer to curl up in the straw, just as every woman knows the delight of an entrance to a room which her presence brightens more than any other's. Molly experienced the same thrill, the same delight. She had the instincts of the coquette; the confidence of inexperience; the false ideals of a knowledge drawn from books and speculation; and her heart had not yet awakened her conscience. She looked forward to her own power over men, for she was intelligent, and realized the extent both of her charms and of her knowledge. The latter was not inextensive, for in her reading she had enjoyed the overwhelming advantage of heredity. Heredity is a little scheme by which, to a great extent, one recognizes knowledge, instead of acquiring it.

They drove along for some distance without speaking. The girl was too happy and the half-breed too preoccupied to talk.

"Mike," she commanded suddenly after a time, "quit that smoking. I don't like it."

The half-breed hesitated, narrowing his brow, and looking straight ahead. Then he silently knocked the ashes from his pipe and slipped it into his pocket. Molly's eyes flashed with triumphant amusement. The game had begun. After a time the sun sank into the dark hills, and the great shadow of Harney crept out of them.

The wagon rattled down a short incline to the broad, shallow bed of the Cheyenne. Molly turned it aside into a little grass plat.

"We'll camp here to-night," she announced.

"There is better water two mile further, on the trail, on Fall River," said Lafond, without moving.

"I said we'd camp here!" repeated the girl sharply.

The half-breed descended and began to unharness the horses.

XV

IN WHICH CHEYENNE HARRY LOSES HIS PISTOL

The camp which was to be the scene of Lafond's operations and of the girl's anticipated triumphs, lay between Ragged Top and Tom Custer. It consisted of a double row of log cabins situated in the V of the deep ravine. The men generally ate in the long dining-room of the hotel, worked at prospecting in the hills, and spent their evenings in the centrally situated Little Nugget saloon, the property of Michaïl Lafond.

The night of the half-breed's arrival the usual crowd was carrying on the usual discussions on the usual subjects.

One fresh from the East entering the building would have been struck first with the strangeness of the room. It was long and low, and on three sides dark. Against the fourth wall was stretched tightly a white cotton sheet, imitating plaster, in front of which stood the bar. The bar was polished, narrow, with a foot rest in front and two towels hanging from metal clasps just under the projecting eaves of it. It had been brought in sections, by wagon, at considerable expense. Some three feet behind the bar, stretched a shelf of the same height, towel covered, on which stood four bottles in front of a little mirror. The shelf was piled symmetrically with glasses of all shapes—tumblers, ponies, fine-stemmed wineglasses—arranged in pyramids and squares. They glittered in the glare of the lamps, and the indirect light from the white sheet. A dim pink reflection was given back by the mirror—dim and pink because the glass was draped with pink mosquito bar. Overhead hung the sign which read, "To Trust is Bust."

Beneath the reflector of the largest lamp lounged the barkeeper reading a paper. He had spread the paper on the bar, and, having crooked his elbows out at wide angles around its margin, was bending his head of straw-colored hair close over the print. He was dressed in white as to the upper part of his body. Occasionally he read aloud in a monotone from the paper. At other times his lips moved slowly, shaping the invisible words as they took form in his sluggish brain.

"The latest creations in ties," he read, "are described by our buyer as being natty effects in the narrow plaids."

Outside this glare of light from the white-dressed man, and the glittering pyramids and squares and glasses, and the dim pink reflections, and the white sheet imitating plaster, the rest of the room seemed dark by contrast. Near the door and the small front window, glowed a red-hot stove. Along the walls were ranged chairs. In the chairs sat many men smoking. Above the men a few cheap pictures were tacked against the rough walls. One of them represented an abnormally slim and smooth race horse against a background of vivid green. Another showed an equally green landscape, throwing into relief a group of red-coated men on spider-legged horses, pursuing a huddle of posing white hounds. One of the spider-legged horses had fallen, and the rider, being projected horizontally forward, was suspended rigidly in mid air, like Mohammed's coffin, and with as much apparent prospect of coming to earth. Still another presented the sight of an exceedingly naked woman descending from an exceedingly flat and marble couch. One foot was on the floor, and the other knee rested still on the flat and marble couch. It was labelled "Surprised."

Three large lamps with reflectors illuminated this part of the room. Then came a strip of comparative dusk; then another hanging-lamp disclosed a smooth-topped table, on which was a faro lay-out.

The men in the chairs smoked industriously and spoke seldom. The air was thick with the smoke of strong tobacco, such as "Hand Made" and "Lucky Strike." Very near the stove sprawled old Mizzou, low-foreheaded, white-bearded, talking always of women and the merits of grass-widows and school-ma'ams.

"They is nothin' like 'em!" he asserted with ever-fresh emphasis of tone. "Back in Chillicothe, whar th' hogs an' gals is co'n-fed, they is shore bustin'! When one of them critters comes 'round, I feels jest like raisin' hell and puttin' a chunk under it!"

"Th' hell you do!" snorted Cheyenne Harry, scowling his handsome brows, "th' hell you do! Give us a rest with yore everlasting females." He pulled his hat over his eyes, and drew savagely on his pipe, his right hand over the bowl, his left clasped tight under his armpit.

Billy Knapp was telling about his mine.

"On that thar Buffalo lode," he said impressively, "I got a lead twenty foot wide. Twenty foot, I say! And it holds out; it holds out a lot. It's great. I says to them Chicago sharps, I says, 'You won't find sech a lead as thet thar nowhere else in the Hills,' and by gravy I believe that's right! I do for shore! An' I says to them, I says, 'It only takes a little sinkin', an' a little five stamp mill, t' put her on a paying basis to wunst. Ain't no manner of doubt of it! I tell you it's a chance! that's what it is!'"

He breathed hard with the enthusiasm into which his words lifted him. He vociferated, telling over and over about his twenty foot lead. He held his great hand suspended in the air through whole sentences, bringing it down with a mighty slap as he came to his conclusions. The men about him listened unmoved. They believed what he said, but they had got over being excited at it. Jack Graham, his hat on his knees, twisted his little moustache and smiled amusedly. As the scout appealed to him from time to time, he nodded silent assent. Over beyond the bar of dusk, two men were staking small sums at faro. The keen-eyed dealer was monotonously calling the cards. "All ready; all down; hands up; jack win; queen lose!" he drawled.

In the corner nearest the door, a youth of eighteen huddled on the floor asleep. Here and there wandered an active wire-haired dog, bigger than a fox terrier and of different color, but with the terrier's bright eyes and alert movements. It was a strange beast, brown and black on the head, black on the body, badger gray on the legs, with sharp white teeth, over which bristled gray whiskers of the stiffness of a hair brush. As it passed the various men, it eyed them closely, ready to wag its stump of a tail in friendship, or to circle warily in avoidance of a kick. It was a self-reliant dog, a dog used to taking care of itself. Men called it Peter, without abbreviation.

Peter was possessed of the spirit of restlessness. He smelled everything, first with dainty sniffs, then with long, deep inhalations. Thus he came to know the inner nature of table legs and chairs, of men's boots and of dark corners. Between investigations he would stand in front of the bar and stretch, sticking first one hind leg, then the other, at stiff angles behind him, and then, fore feet far in front, pressing the chest of his long body nearly to the floor.

These things irritated Cheyenne Harry. He attempted to command Peter harshly, but Peter paid no attention.

"Off his feed," observed Dave Williams to young Barker in an undertone.

"Yeah," agreed the latter.

About eight o'clock Blair and the stage drew in and drew out again, after warming at the red-hot stove a little cross man who cursed the whole West—climate, scenery, and all—with a depth and heartiness that left these loyal Westerners gasping. Billy Knapp had attempted to reply, but had not held his own in the interchange.

After the stranger had gone out, the pristine calm broke into a froth of recrimination. The room shouted. It blamed Billy. It cursed the stranger. It thought of a dozen things that might have been said or done, as is the fashion of rooms. Billy vociferated against the tourist.

"Little two by four prospec' hole!" he cried. "He may be all right whar he comes from, which don't rank high anyhow, but when he comes out yar makin' any sech fool breaks as that, he don't assay a cent a ton fo' sense!"

"Oh, hell," growled Cheyenne Harry. "You-all make me tired!"

"Shake yore grouch, Harry," they advised good-humoredly. Cheyenne Harry was popular, fearless and a good shot. He had a little the reputation, in some quarters, of being a "bad man."

Billy went on with his tirade. The men shook their heads. "You wasn't ace high, Billy," said they. Billy insisted, getting more and more excited. They looked down from the calm of superior wisdom. Their anger vanished in Billy's. He was angry for the whole crowd.

"Moroney ought to have been here," they observed regretfully. "He's th' boy! He'd have trimmed th' little cuss good. Can't get ahead of Moroney nohow."

Billy denied that Moroney could have done better than he, Billy, did. The men championed Moroney's cause with warmth. A new discussion arose out of the old. With a prodigious clatter every man drew up his chair until a circle was formed. Archibald Mudge, alias Frosty, the barkeeper, leaned his head on his fists across the bar, trying to hear. The two men at the faro game cashed in and quit. The faro dealer, imperturbable, indifferent, cat-like, shuffled his cards. Around the outside of the word-hurling circle Peter wandered, sniffing at chairs and the boots of men.

Then on a sudden Molly and the half-breed arrived, to the vast astonishment of Copper Creek, which had no women and expected none.

The newcomers appeared in the doorway, apparently from nowhere, pausing a moment before entering the saloon. Molly leaned a hand on each jamb, and calmly surveyed the room. Lafond blinked his eyes at the light, imperturbably awaiting the girl's good pleasure. After a moment she stepped inside, and again looked the apartment over, slowly, searchingly. She saw in that long sweeping glance everything there was to be seen—the men and their various attitudes, the bar, the glasses, the mirror draped with mosquito bar, the white cotton sheet, the lamps, the faro table, even the three sporting pictures on the wall.

In that moment she made up her mind what to do. Her heart was beating fast and her color was high. She experienced all the sensations of a man going into battle, but not a timid man, or one not sure. Rather, she felt a new access of force, a new confidence, a new imperious power that would bend conditions to suit itself. She knew in a flash just how to tame these untamed men.

Then she stepped swiftly forward and marched up to the bar, against which she leaned the broad of her back, running her arms along the rail on either side and resting one heel against the foot rest. She tossed her curls back, and again looked coolly at the silent men.

An observer might have found it interesting to note how the different inmates of the room took this unexpected appearance of the First Woman. Billy Knapp stared with round, gloating eyes, in which a hundred possibilities awoke. Cheyenne Harry, aroused from his slouching attitude, thrust his pipe into his pocket and furtively smoothed his moustache. Graham looked the newcomer over with cool inquiring scrutiny. Frosty began to polish a glass, finding relief from his embarrassment in accustomed and commonplace occupation. The faro dealer shuffled his cards, imperturbable, indifferent, cat-like. Peter sat upright on his haunches, sniffing daintily, first in the girl's direction, then in the man's, watching, bright-eyed and alert. Peter was the only being in the place who noticed the girl's companion. The latter, in turn, inspected the room deliberately, with a crafty calculation.

"Well," said Molly Lafond, with slow scorn, "how long are you going to sit there before you take care of a lady's horses?"

Then they suddenly became aware of the half-breed and of the white-covered schooner, dimly visible through the door. They began to regain control of their wits. The arrested currents of life moved once more. Who was this girl? Why should she command? Above all, why did not this little black hairy man take care of his own horses? Men helped themselves in the West.

They stirred uneasily, but no one responded. The girl's eyes flashed.

"Move!" she commanded, stretching her arm with a sudden and regal gesture toward the door.

The three men nearest jumped up and hurried out. The girl stood for an instant, her arm still outstretched; then she dropped it to her side with a rippling laugh.

"You boys need someone to make you stand 'round, that's all," she said. "Next time I speak, you rustle!"

She placed her hands behind her on the bar, and jumped lightly upward, perching on one corner and swinging her little feet to and fro. She sat in the focus of one of the larger lamps, seeming to radiate with a strange hard brilliancy. Her eyes sparkled and her curly golden hair escaped from under her old peaked cap in a bewildering tangle of twisted and glittering fire. She went on easily, without embarrassment, chattering in so assured a manner that the men were silenced by the very shyness that should have been hers.

"We got here a little late, boys," she said, conversationally, "on account of a hot box, but here we are—me and Mike. You don't know us though, do you? Well, this is Mike Lafond." She looked toward the half-breed, and a sudden inspiration lit her eye. "Black Mike!" she cried, clapping her hands. "That's it; Black Mike." She paused in happy contemplation of the appropriateness of this nickname. It seemed to fit; and it stuck forever after. "He owns this joint here, he says, and I reckon he says right," she went on after a pause. "He ain't pretty, but I'll tend to that for the family." She perked her head sideways, proving the point beyond contest.

Peter, who had been watching her, his own head in the same attentive pose, took this as a signal. He barked sharply. "Shut up, dog!" commanded Molly. She seized a pretzel from a tin pan at her side and threw it at Peter. Peter considered the pretzel as a contribution, so subsided.

"Well, boys, I'm glad to be here. I'm going to stay. You might look more pleased." She cast her eye along the group of men, each in a tense attitude of uneasiness. Graham's nonchalant and lounging self-poise struck her. "Aren't you glad?" she asked, pointing her finger at him. His quizzical smile only deepened. Failing to confuse him, as she intended, Molly hastily abandoned him. "You ought to be," she asserted, skilfully turning the remark in the direction of Cheyenne Harry. "Come here and let's look at you. I want to know your name. You ain't bashful, are you?"

Harry put on an appearance of ease and sauntered over to the bar. He would show the boys that he was used to society. He grinned at her pleasantly.

"Can't no one look purty nex' to you!" he said boldly.

"Well, well!" cried Molly, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. "That's the first pleasant word I've had, and after I've told you I was coming here to live, too!"

Billy Knapp bounced up, eager to retrieve his reputation.

"Th' camp bids you welcome, ma'am, an' is proud and pleased that such a beauteous member of her lovely sect is come amongst us!" he orated.

The men moved their chairs slightly. One or two cleared their throats. The constraint was beginning to break.

"Thank you," replied Molly prettily. "This is an occasion. Mike here asks you all to have a drink. Don't you, Mike?"

The half-breed nodded. He was watching the progress of affairs keenly.

Frosty set out glasses, into which the men poured whiskey from small black bottles. Harry gave his own to the girl, and then procured another for himself. Mike sat by the stove. Peter approached tentatively, but decided to remain at a wary distance. At the other end of the room the faro dealer shuffled his cards, indifferent, imperturbable, cat-like; a strange man, without friends, implacable and just. The men who had gone to stable the horses entered and received their glasses. The girl raised hers high in the air.

"Now," she cried, "here's hoping we'll all be good friends!"

The men drank their whiskey. They were slowly developing a certain enthusiasm over the new girl. Constraint was gone. They lounged easily against the bar. Two stood out near the middle of the floor, where they could see better, their arms across each other's shoulders. Molly touched her lips to her glass, and handed it to Billy, who stood on the other side of her. "Drink it for me," she whispered confidentially in his ear.

"It'll make me drunk," he said in mock objection. She looked incredulous. "You have touched it with yore lips," he explained sentimentally, and drank to cover his confusion. He felt elated. He had made a pretty speech, too.

The girl laughed and put her hand caressingly on his shoulder. At either knee was one of these great men; about were many others, all looking at her with admiration, waiting for her words. This was triumph! This was power! And then she looked up and found Graham's calm gray eyes fixed on her in quizzical amusement. She turned away impatiently and began to talk.

Never was such airy persiflage heard in a mining camp before. The prospectors were dissolved in a continual grin, exploded in a perpetual guffaw. Now they understood the charm of woman's conversation, which Moroney had so often extolled. They spared a thought to wish that Moroney were here to take part in this. "Moroney can do such elegant horsing," they said. What a pair this would be! How she glanced from one member to the other of the group with her witty speeches! She rapped each man's knuckles hard, to the delight of all the rest, and yet the fillip left no pain, but only a pleasant glow. They laughed consumedly.

And then, after a little, she asked them if they could sing; and without waiting for a reply, she struck up a song of her own in a high, sweet voice. With a gripping of the heart and a catching of the breath, they recognized the air. Not one man there had ever heard its words in a woman's voice before. It was "Sandy Land," the universal, the endless, the beloved, the song that brings back to every Westerner visions of other times when he has sung it, and other places—the night herd, the camp fire, the trail. With the chorus there came a roar as every man present sang out the heart that was in him. The girl was surrounded in an instant. This was the moment of which she had dreamed. She half closed her eyes, and laughed with the gurgling over-note of a triumphant child.

Cheyenne Harry straightened from his lounging position at the girl's left, slipped his arm about her waist, and kissed her full upon the lips.

The room suddenly became very still. Peter could be heard scratching his neck with stiffened hind leg behind the stove. Graham half started from his seat, but sank back as he saw the girl's face. Mike never stirred or missed a puff on his short pipe.

The girl paled a little, and, putting her hands behind her, slid carefully off the edge of the bar to the floor. Then she walked with quick firm steps to the offender and slapped him vigorously, first on one side of the head, then on the other. He raised his elbows to defend his ears, whereupon she reached swiftly forward under his arm and slipped his pistol from its open holster; after which she retreated slowly backward, holding both hands behind her. Cheyenne Harry turned red and white, and looked about him helplessly.

"You ain't big enough to have a gun!" she said, with scorn. "When you get man enough to tell me you're sorry, I'll give it back."

She crossed the room toward the street, dangling the pistol on one finger by the trigger guard.

"I reckon I'll go now," she said simply. She passed through the door to the canvas-covered schooner outside.

A breathless but momentary silence was broken by Cheyenne Harry.

"I know it, boys, I know it," he protested. "Don't say a word. Frosty, trot out the nose paint."

Billy was fuming.

"Hell of a way to do!" he muttered. "Nice hospitable way to welkim a lady! Lovely idee she gets of this camp!"

Harry turned on him slowly. "What's it to yuh?" he asked malevolently. "What's it to yuh, eh? I want to know! Who let you in this, anyway?"

He thrust his head forward at Billy.

"For the love of Peter the Hermit, shut up, you fellows!" cried Jack Graham. "Don't make ever-lasting fools of yourselves. That girl can take care of herself without any of your help, Billy; and it served you dead right, Harry, and you know it."

"That's right, Billy," said several.

Harry growled sulkily in his glass. "Ain't I knowin' it?" he objected. "Ain't I payin' fer this drink because I know it? But I ain't goin' t' have any ranikahoo ijit like Billy Knapp rubbin' it in."

"Billy didn't mean to rub it in," said Jack Graham, "so shake hands and let up."

The threatened quarrel was averted, and the men drank on Harry. Then Mike set up the drinks to the furtherance of their friendly relations. They talked to Mike at length, inquiring his plans, approving his sense in choosing Copper Creek as a residence, congratulating him on his daughter, commending her style. Mike hoped they would make the Little Nugget their evening headquarters. They replied with enthusiasm that they would. Mike made himself agreeable in a quiet way, without saying much. Everybody was "stuck" on him—everybody but Harry. Harry sulked over Billy's insults. His sullen mood had returned. Finally, late in the evening, he pushed his chair back abruptly and went up to the bar.

"I'm goin'," he announced. "Give me that bottle."

He poured himself a stiff drink, which he absorbed at a toss of the wrist, and turned away.

"Mr. Mortimer," called Frosty, "did you pay for this?"

"Chalk it down to me," called Harry, without looking back.

Frosty caught the snake eye of his proprietor fixed upon him. He twisted his feet in terror beneath the bar. "It's agin the rules," he called at last, weakly, just as Harry reached the door.

The latter turned in heavy surprise. Then he walked deliberately back to the bar, on which he leaned his elbows.

"Look yere," he said truculently, "ain't I good fer that?"

"Why, yes, I reckon so," cried poor Frosty in an agony. "But it's agin the rules."

"Rules, rules!" sneered Harry. "Since when air you runnin' this joint on rules? Ain't you chalked drinks up to me before? Ain't you? Answer me that. Ain't you?"

"But it's different now," objected Mudge.

"Different, is it? Well, you chalk that drink up to me as I tell yuh, or go plumb to th' devil for the pay. And don't you bother me no more, or I'll have to be harsh to yuh!" Harry loved to bully, and he was working off his irritation. The men in the room stood silent. Harry liked an audience. He went on: "I'll shoot up yore old rat joint yere till you ain't got glass enough left to mend your wall eye, you white-headed little varmint."

Lafond had come softly to the end of the bar. "Naw," he interrupted quietly, "you are not shooting up anything."

Harry turned slowly to him and spread his legs apart. "And did you address me, sir?" he begged with mock politeness. "Would you be so p'lite as to repeat yore remarks?"

"You are not shooting up anything," reiterated Mike, "and it is you who will settle for this drink. Behold the sign which you have read!"

Harry turned to the room wide eyed. "Did you hear the nerve of it?" he inquired. "Tellin' me what I'll do! You damn little greaser," he cried in sudden fury, "I'll show you whether I'm shootin' up anythin'!"

He reached for his gun, remembered on the instant that his holster was empty, and sprang for Lafond. The half-breed calmly lifted a whiskey glass, near which he had taken the precaution to stand, and slopped its contents full in the other's eyes. Harry, blinded, struck against the corner of the bar. Mike slipped to one side and produced his revolver.

Several sprang between the two men. The room was in an uproar. Peter barked, clamant, frantic. Everybody tried to talk at once. In the background the faro dealer ceased shuffling his cards, and began imperturbably, indifferently, to pack together his layout. He had made little that night. After a moment he went out, without a glance toward the excited group.

The men were forcing the blinded and raving Harry toward the door. Mike leaned over the bar, watching with bright eyes, his arms folded across his chest and the pistol barrel peeping over the crook of one elbow.

When they had all gone out, most of them shouting good-natured farewells, he turned savagely on the pale-faced Mudge. The native cruelty of the man blazed forth. He scored the barkeeper with a tongue that lashed like a whip, vituperating, crushing with the weight of his sarcasm, frightening with the vividness of his threats. Mudge shrank back into the corner of the space behind the bar, spreading his arms along either side, watching the half-breed with wide-open fascinated eyes, as one would watch a dangerous wild beast.

After a little the storm passed. Lafond asked in surly tones where the bunk was. Frosty showed him his own, behind the saloon, in a little shack of hewn timbers. Without a word Lafond turned in, dressed as he was, and closed his eyes. For a time he ruminated slowly. He had seen his man, and already he could put his finger on one weak point in Billy's personality—love of the spectacular, of bombast. A blow to his vanity would hurt. The half-breed had also taken fair measure of most of the other men in the room. He knew how to ingratiate himself, and his bold move in the case of Cheyenne Harry had had that object directly in view. He did not as yet see clearly just what form his blow to Billy's vanity was to take, but that would come with time. Lafond's calling and his position in the new town gave him unlimited opportunities for observation, and he was in no hurry. After waiting fifteen years, another twelvemonth would not matter.

"Go slow," said Black Mike to himself.

His doze was abruptly broken by Frosty's scared voice asking a question. The barkeeper's thick wits could not take in the situation. He was frightened almost out of his senses, and incapable of consecutive thought.

"And where shall I sleep, sir?" he asked stupidly in a timid little voice.

Mike turned over explosively. "You can sleep in hell for all of me!" he shouted angrily. "Get out!"

Frosty returned to the main room of the saloon. There he spread a horse blanket, redolent of the stables, on the floor behind the stove. After a time Peter lay down beside him. The barkeeper, frightened, stupid, vaguely nervous, in his slow nerveless way, gathered the strange intelligent dog to him, and the two slept.

The men took Harry to the creek, where he washed out his eyes. They had many comments to make, to none of which Harry vouchsafed a reply. But his sulkiness was gone. Suddenly he paused for a moment in his ablutions, and laughed.

"Damned if they ain't a pair!" he asserted. "And that gal——"

"She shore beats grass-widders and school-ma'ams!" said Old Mizzou.

XVI

AND GETS IT BACK AGAIN

The girl had seen all that Lafond had seen and more. She knew now that Billy Knapp was easily the most important figure in the camp; that Cheyenne Harry was the most admired and feared; that Jack Graham was the most likely to be heard from in the future. The other men fell into the background behind these three figures. The situation was simplified by the fact. All she needed now for complete triumph was, to discover the vulnerable points of these three, attack them craftily, and the game was hers.

She thought she knew the way. She fell asleep dreaming of it. She awoke in the early morning with the day's plan clear and perfect in her mind, each move in the game she was to play clearly outlined before her. It had come to her in the night without conscious effort on her own part.

She dressed herself in the semi-obscurity of the wagon-body, and stepped out into the morning. The brook was not far away. She discovered it, and bathed her face and throat in its ice-cold waters. Then she returned to the wagon, where she made breakfast of a huge irregular chunk of bread and slices of cold bacon, sitting on the wagon tongue and swinging her feet carelessly back and forth while eating. Occasionally she threw a remnant to the few silent Canada jays that drifted here and there in the sleeping town, fluffed out like milkweed pollen in the summer, searching for scraps. They swooped to her offerings on swift motionless wing, and then retreated to a distance, whence they abused their benefactor with strident voice. The girl watched them idly.

How to impress her personality in the most agreeable way on the greatest number of men! The problem was many faceted. She must not show favoritism; therefore the method must be general. She must render herself and not merely her sex agreeable: therefore it would have to be personal. It must appeal to the men's sense of protection rather than to their mere admiration; therefore in it she must efface herself, and exalt them. This was all apparently contradictory. But no; she saw it clearly in a flash. She must let them do her a favor. Instinctively she realized, though she did not formulate the thought, that this is one of the sure ways of gaining a man's good will. She cast back over the necessities of the case, and saw that it would suffice. In doing something for her, they would at once stand well in their own eyes, because of a certain consciousness of unselfish effort; they would expand protectively toward her, because of her weakness, implied in the fact that they could do her a kindness. What was the favor to be? The wagon behind her answered the question. They should build her a house.

All this passed through her mind, as a drift setting in from upstream, gliding before her consciousness, and floating on down stream in unhasting progression. She did not realize that she was thinking out a problem; at least she made no effort to do so. It came to her as she needed it. To all appearance she was watching idly, with unruffled brow, the tenuous threads of smoke which indicated that the camp was awakening. The number of these smoke signals suggested a new problem. She could hardly enlist the entire population of a camp the size of Copper Creek in the task of building one little log cabin. The idea of the swarming multitude struck her as so funny that she laughed aloud. She must choose; and the choice must be judicious. The men selected must represent the influential element, the leaders of opinion; while those denied the privilege of serving her must be the sort who always follow with the majority. Here her intuition balked, and her scanty knowledge could not help it out. She was frankly puzzled.

As she sat there knitting her brows, a boy came up the street. He was bare-foot, straw-hatted, freckled. He had wide gray eyes, a snub nose, and an impudent mouth. His clothes were varied and inadequate. Over his arm he carried a little rifle. About him, at a wary distance, frisked Peter, escaped from the Little Nugget through some mysterious back exit.

The boy occasionally threw an impatient stick at Peter, whereupon Peter would suddenly place two paws in front of him and bend his back down, with every appearance of delight. Then the boy would issue commands to Peter anent returning home, to which Peter paid not the slightest attention. So absorbed was he in his effort to get rid of what he evidently considered an undesirable companion, that he did not notice the girl until he was within a few yards of her. He then gave his entire attention to her inspection. He stood on one spot and stared without winking, digging a big toe into the dust. His unabashed eyes took in every detail. He was without embarrassment, and evidently gave not a thought to the effect of this extended scrutiny on the object of it.

"Hello, kid!" called Molly.

The boy completed his leisurely inspection. Then, "Hello," he answered, with reserve.

"Won't you come over and see me?"

He weighed the point and drew nearer.

"Who are you?" he asked bluntly.

"My name's Molly; what's yours?"

"Dennis Moroney. They call me the Kid. What-chew doin' here?"

"I'm going to live here."

"Oh," said he, and looked her all over again. "This rifle's a flobert," he observed.

"Is it? Let's see. What do you shoot with it? Is there much game up here?"

"Don't snap it; it's bad for it. They's lots of game. I got a fox squirrel the other day. He was so long. He was up a big pine, and I hit him right through the head."

"You must be a good shot. Will you take me hunting with you some day?"

"I dunno," he replied doubtfully. "Girls ain't much good."

"Try me," urged Molly, smiling.

"I'll let you shoot her off anyway," he said magnanimously. "But you gotter help clean her. If you don't clean her, she gets rusty and won't shoot straight. Here's the catridges."

"What little bits of things! Will they kill anything?"

"Hoh!" replied the Kid with contempt.

"Is that your dog?" hastily inquired Molly, conscious of her error. Peter was busily engaged in acquiring an olfactory knowledge of the four wheels and two axles of the wagon.

"Him? Naw. He's the bigges' fool dog I ever see. He goes along unless you tie him up. And he keeps rummagin' around, and he scares all the game there is. I can't make him stay home."

A cabin door opened quickly, and a miner issued forth.

"There goes Dan Barker," said the Kid.

In twenty minutes Molly knew the history of everyone of any importance in town. She found the child's primitive instinct of hero worship an unerring touchstone by which to judge of each individual's influence in this little community. He reflected the camp's opinion, and this was exactly what she wanted to learn. She encouraged the boy to talk—not a difficult matter, for his attentions had hitherto been quite ignored, saving by Frosty and Peter. Frosty had proved valuable always in the matter of skinning game or extracting refractory shells, but he had never, even in his youngest days, been a boy. Between Peter and the Kid was waged a perpetual war on the subject of hunting methods. The Kid believed in stalking. Peter held the opinion that the chase was the only noble form of the sport. The child had been lonely, strange. Now he chatted to Molly with all the self-reliant confidence which pertains of right to healthy boyhood, but which heretofore he had been denied. He boasted with accustomed air. He spoke lightly of great deeds. Molly did not laugh at him. His heart warmed to her, and he fell in love with her on the spot. This was perhaps the most important conquest the girl was destined to make, for there is no devotion in the world like that of a boy of thirteen for a girl older than himself.

"WATCH ME HIT THAT SQUIRREL!"

In a little time, Molly had gathered a number of men about her, and was holding them by sheer force of charm.

"How are you?" she called pleasantly to the first.

"Purty smart," grinned the man, slouching past awkwardly. "How's yourself?"

"Good. Come on over and see me and the Kid for awhile."

She talked to him lightly, while he lumbered along after with his slow wits. Other men came out, to all of whom she called a greeting, and some of whom she summoned to her. She held them easily. It became an audience, a court. They had a good time. There was much laughter. No one grudged the delay. Each man held his axe shouldered, expecting to go on to work in a moment or so, but still lingering—because she willed that he should.

After a time, the hotel began to give up its inmates. The gambler came forth into the sunshine and lit a cigarette. Graham joined him, casting an amused eye at the men about the wagon. Two or three others, including the proprietor, leaned against the hitching rail watching the animated group. Finally Cheyenne Harry sauntered carelessly forth. His broad hat—straight-brimmed in a lop-brimmed camp—was pushed to one side. He swaggered a little.

The girl saw him and jumped down from the wagon tongue, breaking off suddenly in a remark she was making.

"Hi, you!" she called.

He paid no attention.

"Hi, you!" she repeated, jumping up and down with a pretty impatient flutter of the hands. "Hi, you! Come here! You're wanted!"

He looked up surprised.

"Come here!" she repeated.

And he went.

"Now, boys," she said, when he had joined the group, "I'm going to live with you, and if I live with you, I must have a place to live in. So I want you to build me a shack. Will you do it?"

The men looked at one another.

"All right," went on Molly, taking their silence for consent, and assuming a small air of proprietorship which became her well. She specified site and size. "And you," she commanded Cheyenne Harry, "are to boss one gang and I'll take the other. You stay here and level up, and I'll go with some of the boys to cut the timber."

She knew Harry would not refuse because his pistol holster was empty and all the camp knew why. And yet levelling up is a most disagreeable job, for it is a question of pulverized rock and wood blocks, in soft ground; and of blasting with dynamite, in hard ground.

Molly issued her orders rapidly. Axes were found, log chains exhumed from the warehouse dust, horses harnessed. She waited long enough to see the gang under Cheyenne Harry well started in its work; and then, herself mounted on one of the horses, she and the other men took their way down the ravine in search of timber. She was satisfied with having been able to give Cheyenne Harry just the position of authority in the little undertaking which he now held, but she confessed to a feeling of disappointment that Billy Knapp had not been forthcoming, for he too should have had a place in her scheme. She had observed Jack Graham near the hotel, but she had other ideas in regard to the management of that refractory individual.

But it so happened that, in regard to Billy, chance helped her out. The route selected ran up the valley, and about the bend was situated the Great Snake lode, Billy Knapp's famous claim, before the shack of which its proprietor was at that very moment fuming savagely over the non-arrival of certain men he had hired to build more fitting quarters for the new company's inspection. Billy blew a big cloud from his pipe, and swore, when he finally caught sight of a group of axemen and horses headed in his direction.

The men saw him too. They began to laugh. "Good one on Billy Knapp," they agreed. "He must be pretty hot when his axe gang don't come any."

The girl overheard them.

"What's that about Billy Knapp?" she asked sharply.

"Didn't mean y' to hear, ma'am," replied the speaker. "Don' matter ez fur's we's concerned. But Billy, he aims to put up a shack to-day, gettin' ready for them tenderfeet that's comin' from Cheecawgo to look over th' property; an' he hires a lot of th' boys t' put it up fer him, an', you see, you runs off with 'most the hull outfit yere to build you a shack. So, natural, we thinks it makes Billy hot."

"I see," said Molly. She reflected a moment. "Where is it?" she asked.

"That's it, right to the lef'. And that's Billy walkin' 'round loose." They laughed again.

Without a word she turned the animal she was riding sharp to the left, and began to mount the little knoll. The men followed in consternation. Billy's patience was not noted for its evenness.

"Hullo, Billy!" she cried when she was near enough. "Good morning!"

Billy had not at first caught sight of her, and was now plainly a little nonplussed over his unexpected guest. Clearly he could not at this moment "cuss out" the delinquents as they deserved. He removed his broad black hat.

"Good mo'ning! Good mo'ning!" he replied to the girl's greeting. "Come up t' see th' wo'ks?"

"Whoa!" called Molly. The men stopped. "No," she said flatly, "I didn't. Not to-day, that is. I'm busy. I'm hunting for good timber."

Billy looked puzzled. "Timber?" he repeated.

"Yes, timber. I'm going to have a shack built, and these boys are going to put it up for me."

Thus she broke the news gently. Billy looked the men over one by one. He turned a slow red.

"Huh!" he observed at last. "I thought they was goin' to wo'k fo' me!"

"Did you?" asked Molly sweetly. "Well, they're not; at least, not now."

That was categorical. Billy's wits did not respond to this sort of emergency very quickly. He did not want to be rude; he did not care to lose his men. Molly looked down.

"Come here and tie my shoestring," she commanded, holding out her foot, and gripping the harness with both hands.

Billy did not remember that he had ever seen so small a foot. He looked, fascinated.

"Well!" she said impatiently.

He raised his head and gazed plump into the imperious depths of a pair of blue eyes. His anger melted. He approached and attempted to tie the shoe.

None but Molly ever knew how hard that horse was kicked by the other little shoe. Indeed, no one knew at all how it happened. Some of the eye-witnesses theorized concerning bumblebees. Others said horseflies. As to the main facts, there was no doubt—that he, the horse, gave a sudden startled plunge; that she, the girl, screamed slightly and started to fall; that he, Billy Knapp, caught her full in his arms, held her the fraction of a second, and set her lightly back on the again motionless animal.

Molly caught her breath and steadied herself on Billy's shoulder. Three men officiously held the horse's head.

"My!" she gasped. "I'd like to be as strong as that!"

Billy whirled on the axe gang with a great bluster.

"Yere, you fellers!" he shouted. "What 're y' standin' around yere for? Take them hosses up in th' brush behind my shack, an' cut th' lady some timber!"

"Go ahead, boys," said Molly. She slid down from the horse. "I'll be 'long in a minute. I'm a little scairt."

They clambered on up the hill, grinning. A clank of chains told when they had stopped. A moment later the ring of axes was heard. The Kid and the rifle had disappeared in the direction of Peter's rapid and scrambling exit. The boy and the dog hated each other apparently, and yet they could not bear to be long apart.

The girl sat down on the ground and made Billy talk about himself, which was the obvious thing to do. Billy was one of those expansive sanguine individuals without much ability in what we call practical affairs, and yet with a certain dexterity in gathering unto himself the means with which to be impractical. Because of this, he had a good opinion of himself, which at the same time he was much given to doubting. Molly induced him to flatter himself, and then deftly agreed with him.

After a time they went up through the pines to where the workmen were felling trees. Toward noon the whole party returned to town, dragging behind the horses a number of tree trunks chained together with steel chains. These were slid to the site of the house, and left in the road.

The men in camp had nearly finished their job of levelling up. Cheyenne Harry had worked hard with his own hands. In the shade of the Little Nugget, Black Mike and Graham sat, chair tilted, contemplatively watching the process. Through the open door could be perceived a gleam of white that indicated Frosty; otherwise the street of the town was empty. The prospectors were all out in the hills, preparing a suitable showing for the inspection of the boom which they felt sure must be close at hand.

The united forces rolled the foundation timbers in place, straining, sweating, grunting, for it was no easy work. The sun stood straight overhead. After a little, observing this, Molly called a halt for the noon hour. To each man she addressed a word of thanks, and a reminder that the job was but half over. The reminder however was unnecessary, for, under the stimulus of concerted effort, public sentiment had crystallized into the opinion that the housing of a "first woman" was a public duty.

In a few moments the street was deserted, save for Cheyenne Harry and the two men under the eaves of the Little Nugget. From the chimneys of some of the cabins the smoke of cooking arose.

Cheyenne Harry, volatile, changeable, fickle, stood still in the middle of the dusty road and cursed himself for a fool. He had blistered his hands, overheated himself most uncomfortably, and made his muscles ache with unwonted lifting. For what? For a girl who, the evening before, had boxed his ears and stolen his gun. Fascinated by a pair of pretty eyes and a petty display of courage, he had worked himself like a horse. He dropped his head in a brown study, moodily digging away at the ground with his heel, ruminating bitterly over his egregious folly.

"Thank you very much," said a soft little voice, breaking in on his irritation like a silver bell on a moody silence.

He raised his head, and beheld Molly standing before him, looking up at him with grave sweet eyes. There was a hint of weariness in her drooping eyelids that appealed subtly to his own weary spirit. She seemed, standing there in the deserted street, to typify for the moment the aloofness of his mood.

"You've been good to me this morning," she went on in a quiet monotone, "mighty good!"

She stepped nearer to him until her breast almost touched his.

"I want you to look up at that pine over there until I tell you you can quit," she said as gravely as a child about to bestow a sugar plum.

Harry turned his eyes to the hill.

She stooped swiftly and drew the band of a holster and belt around his hips. Unmindful of his promise, he looked down on her in surprise.

"Don't be mad," she pleaded. "I got Frosty to get it for me from your shack, so I could put your gun in it. And now you'll wear it for me, won't you? I said you couldn't have it till you told me you were sorry. Well, you have told me you were sorry, in the best way—by doing something. I know how it is. I've had to work. It's no fun to be laughed at; and you'll always be as good and brave as you were this morning, won't you?"

A rush as of something beautiful swept over him. His eyes filled and he tried to speak, but turned away.

"Now, run along," she exclaimed gayly, giving him a little pat on the shoulder, "and don't forget you've got a job for this afternoon!"

She stood for a moment in the middle of the road watching him.

Graham, sitting under the eaves of the Little Nugget, surveyed the little scene with cynical eyes. He watched the girl walk toward the saloon. She had taken off her sunbonnet and the noon sun was gilding her hair. She was pensive and thoughtful, and looked down. He told himself that she did this because it was a becoming pose. Graham was the sort of man whom pretence, craftiness, guile, always roused to arms. So long as he was antagonized, or thought he was, his bitterness and scorn were unappeasable; but once his ascendancy was freely acknowledged, he threw away its advantages with the utmost generosity. He thought he saw through this girl, and so he despised her and her tricks alike.

As she approached, Lafond arose and went inside the saloon, where he began to inquire of Frosty in regard to dinner. The girl sat down in the vacated chair. Beyond a curt little nod to Graham she did not notice his presence.

Over Tom Custer an eagle was wheeling slowly to and fro, barking with the mere delight of being on the wing. Molly fixed her eyes dreamily on the bird, but without apparent consciousness of more than the mere fact of its wide motion. Graham imperturbably whittled a pine stick, and whistled at the sky.

This state of affairs continued for some time.

"How do you keep the dirt from coming through the roof?" asked Molly suddenly, her mind, to all appearance, entirely on the work in hand.

Graham explained briefly.

"Thank you," said Molly.

After a few minutes more Graham shifted his knife into his left hand, and began idly to stab the bench with it. Several times he opened his mouth to speak.

"You've got him well trained," he observed finally, with a slight curl of the lip.

"Who? What do you mean?" she cried, genuinely surprised out of the indifference she had assumed.

"Him—Lafond. He knows when to go away. Why did you want to get rid of him?"

"I didn't want to get rid of him. It was so I could be alone."

"That's consistent! It was nothing of the kind. It was so you could be alone—with me."

She looked him over, flushing angrily. Then she deliberately turned her shoulder to him.

"You are very impudent," she remarked coldly. "You seem to forget that I don't even know you. I don't know why I sit here and listen, except that I am comfortable, and don't care to be driven away."

"You wanted to capture me some way or another," he went on musingly, catching a glimmer of the truth; "same as those poor fools out there in the sun. I'd just like to know how you meant to do it and what you'd have done to me. Would you have flattered me, or coaxed me, or what?"

The girl did not reply.

"How?" he urged, expecting an angry outburst, but profoundly indifferent to it.

"You are cruel," she answered softly, after a pause, "and very unjust." Her cheeks were glowing and there was a glint in her eye, but he could not see that. "They are only kind and good, not fools."

"Of course they're good, but they are good because you fool them into it," persisted Graham, spitefully pressing home his point. "You want to win 'em all, just like a woman, but you're too clumsy about it. Anybody can see through that sort of tommyrot, if he isn't a fool. So I call them fools, and I stick to it."

"With you it's different," she replied, hesitating almost before each word. "You ain't the same kind. I know it's foolish, but I can't help it, and I don't think I'm so much to blame. Perhaps I am trying to make them like me. Is there so much harm in that? Nobody has ever liked me before. I have no mother and no sisters—only Mike. I want to be liked, and—and—I'm sorry if you don't think I ought to, but it can't be helped."

She looked out again at the eagle slowly circling over Tom Custer, with eyes vaguely troubled. Graham could examine her closely without the danger of detection. He did so.

There was something pathetically child-like about her after all, something delicate in the oval of her face and the sensitive modelling of her chin, which appealed to a man's protective instincts. Her eyes were so wide and blue and wistful, and again so pathetically young, like those of a little child gazing upon the shower-wet world from the safety of a window. Graham suddenly realized that this was no self-sufficient, capable woman whom he was so bluntly antagonizing, but only a pinafored innocent playing with forces of which she did not know the meaning. He began all at once to feel sorry for her. Against her probable future in this rough camp, how small the present looked, how little were her coquetries, her innocent wiles!

She sighed almost inaudibly. The eagle folded his wings and dropped like a plummet from the upper air, only to swoop upward on outspread pinions a moment later.

Graham began to be ashamed of himself. His thoughts took a new direction. He wondered what her previous history, her education, could have been. Her face was pure, her eyes clear. Could she have lived always with the half-breed? Both spoke English of an excellence beyond the common—in that country, at least. Then he began idly to watch the sunlight running nimbly up and down a single loose tress of her hair, as the wind lifted it and let it fall.

The girl turned and caught his eyes fairly.

"What is it?" she asked simply.

"I was wondering," he replied with equal simplicity, "whether you had always lived with him."

"No," she replied, without pretending not to understand the purport of his question. Then, in the same little voice, in which was a trace, just a trace, of an infinite dreariness: "I have lived all my life at an Indian agency. He came and took me away a little while ago. He is good to me," she said doubtfully, "and I am glad to be away. The agent was good to me, but there were only a few people, and I only read and read and read, or rode and rode and rode, and knew nothing at all of people. I got tired of it. Nobody cared for me there. Nobody cares for me anywhere, I reckon, except Mike, and his caring for people doesn't count so very much."

She turned upon him again that vaguely troubled gaze, which seemed to see him, and yet to look beyond him.

"Poor little girl," said Graham, on a sudden deeply moved.

"Poor little girl!" he repeated with infinite tenderness, and took her idle hand in both of his.

"Poor little girl!" he said for the third time. She put her other hand before her eyes; then, releasing herself gently, she rose and glided through the door without a word.

Once inside the portal her eyes cleared with a snap. She laughed.

XVII

BLACK MIKE MEETS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE AND STARTS A COLLECTION

In the course of this same morning, Lafond had discovered an old acquaintance.

He arose early, and spent some time after breakfast investigating and criticising the premises. Frosty's administration had, it must be confessed, been rather slack, and there were many loose ends. These Black Mike gathered into a cat o' nine tails with which to lash his subordinate. After he had done more for Frosty's character in sixty minutes than that young man, unaided, could have accomplished in as many months, he left the scene of his reorganizations behind, and strolled about in the one narrow street of the village.

He soon saw all there was to be seen there. With a vague idea of finding his way to the famous Great Snake Mine, he rambled out from the double row of log cabins, around the bend, and into the lower gulch. He had defined to himself two things very clearly—that Billy Knapp was now easily the most important figure in the community, and that a continuance of this importance depended entirely on his effecting a combination of his group of claims with Eastern capital. In the Black Hills nearly all of the promising leads are of quartz, requiring in their development more expensive machinery than any ordinary man is able to afford. Until the good angel arrives, they are so much crumbling red rock or white crystal; but with the erection of a stamp mill, within wagon distance, they become valuable. Mike had set himself to the task of depriving Billy Knapp at once of his property and of his prestige; but since he could not hold him up at the point of a pistol, as might have been done had it been the question of a watch or a scarf-pin, he did not at present see just how it was to be accomplished. Ruminating these matters, he found himself all at once in a cañon much grown with underbrush, full of birds, and possessing a general air of the gentler aspects of nature.

Immediately before him stood a double cabin, its two parts connected by a passage way. The foundations of its timbers were encircled by broad bands of red geraniums. Behind the buildings, chained to posts, he perceived three wild animals. One was a short, comical, and shaggy bear; the second, an equally furry but more eager-looking raccoon; the third, a bobcat with tasselled ears.

Mike paused and surveyed them with amusement. As he stood there the door of the cabin opened and the owner stepped out into the sunshine. The half-breed never forgot a face which a vital incident had impressed on his memory; and though this old, white-haired, mild-eyed man had passed in and out of his life in the space of one evening fifteen years ago, Lafond recognized without difficulty the stranger whose words had given him so powerful an impetus toward his new way of life. It was Durand, the butterfly hunter.

He was little changed. And again the coarser man felt, as fifteen years before, the air of gentle and quaint courtesy, which a keener observer would have associated with an old-fashioned society now quite passed away. It should have gone with ruffles and silken hose, with powdered hair and silver shoe buckles.

The naturalist caught sight of the newcomer and approached.

"They are quite gentle," he assured, explaining the beasts. He rubbed the heavy fur of the raccoon the wrong way. "Ah, Jacques," he said to the little animal, relapsing quaintly into a sort of old-time speech, "thy hair doth resemble in stiffness of texture the bristles of thine own curry brush."

The raccoon uttered his high, purring over-note, and seized the man's fingers with his little black hands, almost human. The bear waved his paws appealingly. The bobcat danced back and forth at the end of its leash. "Peace, my children," chided the old man, bestowing on each a pat. "It is not yet the hour of noon." He stooped to unsnap the raccoon's chain; and then, as though recalling the half-breed's presence, he turned with an air of apology.

"You are a stranger here?" he asked. "Yes? And you walk this morning for your pleasure? Yes? That happens not often in these parts." He went on, conversing shyly but easily, with the obvious desire of pleasing the half-breed rather than himself. Lafond had opportunity to observe the great solidity of the logs composing the cabin walls, and to recognize that the structure must belong to the earlier period of the primitive architecture of the Hills—for there are such periods.

"You have lived here long," he suggested, following out this inference.

"Yes," laughed the old man softly, "very long. The camp there came to me. I was an old timer when the first house was built."

After a little, they entered the cabin together, and Lafond found himself in a sheet-ceiled room, strewn with all sorts of literary and scientific junk. The imagination could discover much food for speculation in the curiosities literally heaped about the apartment, but most wonderful of all, seizing the eye, holding it from all else, were the scores of shallow glass-fronted boxes hanging everywhere on the wall. They were lined with white paper pasted over a layer of cork. In them, row after row, were impaled butterflies of many colors. Thousands of the pretty insects were there outspread, varying in size from the tiny blue Lycaena to the great Troilus or the gorgeous yellow and black Turnus. They were exquisitely prepared, with just the right lift on the wings, just the proper balance of the long antennae, until it seemed that they must be on the point of flight, and one almost expected that in another moment the air would be filled with a fluttering, many-hued splendor.

The men seated themselves in two home-made chairs. The raccoon, evidently from old winter-time habit, waddled in a dignified fashion to the fireless stove, where he curled up like a door-mat with keen, bright eyes. Mike's gaze roamed about the apartment.

"You are a great scientist," he observed, intending the remark for a compliment.

"In a way, in a way," replied the old man humbly. "One must occupy the mind when one is alone, and what task more fitting to our highest faculties than that of investigating, with all due reverence, the workings of God's mechanism?"

He said it with a simple piety which could not provoke a smile. Michaïl Lafond caught himself wondering what he did there. Surely there was nothing to interest him in stuffed insects and a garrulous old man, especially as the conversation insisted on retaining its formal footing.

"You are not a miner?" the entomologist inquired, after a moment's pause.

"No," replied Mike.

"I am glad to hear it. I like not this eager scrambling for what does so little good. I too once—— But now I am content; yes, content. There is always good if one will but find it. I myself might with justice be accused of being a miner. I find my leads, I develop them, I assay my ores; but always in miniature—on a small scale."

Then, in a flash, Michaïl Lafond saw at least the outlines of his plan, and he knew why he had come in here to talk to the garrulous old man.

"You know the assay, then?" he inquired conversationally.

"In a modest way—a few simple tests."

"But that is much. Do you not know that it is at Rapid, in the School of Mines, that the nearest assayer is? You have a profession here at your lands."

A sudden scream broke through the apartment, a rush of wings, a growl. The old man ran nimbly to the stove, and rescued the little raccoon from the savage attacks of a magpie. The magpie sailed back to his perch on one of the butterfly cases, where he ruffled his feathers indignantly. The raccoon curled up in the old man's lap.

"You are French?" inquired the latter, with more interest than he had hitherto shown.

"I have some French blood," replied Lafond cautiously.

"I knew it," said Durand, immensely pleased. "I am rarely mistaken. It was a twist of your words that suggested it, an idiom. Et maintenant nous pouvons causer," he added in the purest Parisian accent.

"Oui, oui, oui," cried the half-breed, suddenly swept up by an uncontrollable excitement he could not himself understand. "La belle langue!"

He felt an unwonted expansion of the heart at thus hearing once more the language of his youth. The formality of the interview was gone. They conversed freely, swiftly, animatedly. Durand had been educated in Paris, and had a thousand reminiscences to impart. He told of many quaint customs, and Lafond, with growing emotion, recalled similar or analogous customs among his own expatriated branch of the race in the pine forests of Canada. His sullen, taciturn manner broke. He became the Gaul. He gesticulated, he overflowed, his eye lighted up, he said a thousand things.

After a time Durand opened a chest at the foot of the bed, from which he abstracted a bottle and two long-stemmed glasses. These he placed on the table with a quaint little air of ceremony.

"Sir," said he, "we must know each other better. We speak each the language we love. We talk of old days. Sir," he concluded, bowing with stately grace as he poured the red wine into the glasses, "I ask you to drink wine with me to our acquaintance. My name is Durand."

He inclined, his hand to his heart, and somehow there seemed to be nothing ridiculous in the act.

"I am Michaïl Lafond," replied the half-breed simply.

A silence fell. The realities came back to Lafond's mind.

"I would ask you a favor," he said abruptly.

"Name it; it is yours."

"I want you to teach me how to make an assay."

"It would be a pleasure. I will do it gladly."

"Is it difficult?"

"Not very."

"When shall we begin?"

"When you say."

Lafond reflected. "Well, I will bring some ore in a day or two." Then, after a pause, as though in deference to the attitude he knew the old man held in regard to such things, he added, "It must be very interesting, this making of gold from the rock."

"And more interesting still," supplemented Durand gently, "is the thrill of a shared thought."

The raccoon stood on his hind legs in his master's lap, and began deliberately to investigate the contents of his pockets, deftly inserting his little black hands, almost human, and watching the man's face with alert eyes. Durand took the animal's small head between both his palms, and smiled at him affectionately.

"Ah, Jacques, polisson! Thou art a rogue, and dost learn early what thy master's race doth teach. See, Lafond, how the little villain would even now rob the very one who doth give to him his daily bread and all that which he hath." He softly rubbed the small, black nose with the flat of his palm, much to its owner's disgust. Jacques backed off deliberately to the floor, where he sneezed violently, while Durand gazed at him with a kindly smile.

After leaving the cabin, Black Mike no longer slouched along unseeing. He burned with the inspiration of an idea. Just where the idea would lead him, or how it would work out in its final processes, he did not know; but he had long since grown accustomed to relying blindly on such exaltations of confidence as the present, sure that details would develop when needed. He believed in letting the pot boil.

Through the town he walked with brisk, business-like steps, out into the higher gulch. There he soon came upon signs of industry. Up a hill he could hear the ring of axes and the occasional rush of a falling tree, sounding like grouse drumming in the spring. He followed the sound. Half way up the knoll, he discovered a cabin and three shafts. A rude sign announced that this represented the surface property of the Great Snake Mining and Milling Company. Lafond halted abruptly when he saw the sign. For perhaps half an hour he looked over, with the eye of a connoisseur, the three piles of ore at the mouths of the three shafts, approving silently of the evidence of slate walls, crumbling between his strong fingers the oxygenated quartz, putting his tongue to the harder specimens to bring out their color by moisture, gazing with some curiosity at the darker hornblende. Finally he selected a number of the smaller specimens, with which he filled the ample pockets of his shooting-coat. After this he returned to town and the Little Nugget saloon, where he emptied his pockets on the bar.

"Get some of that packin' stuff out behind," he commanded Frosty, "and with it construct a shelf there by the mirror."

He stood over Frosty while the latter, frightened into clumsiness, hammered his fingers, the wall, the rude shelf, anything but the nail. Finally, Lafond thrust him aside with a curse, and finished the job himself. On the completed shelf he ranged about half of the specimens which he had picked up from the ore dumps. Beneath these he tacked a label, indicating that they were from the Great Snake Mine.

Then he joined Jack Graham outside, and settled down to watch the group of men engaged in laying the foundation timbers of a new log shack.

XVIII

TIRED WINGS

In spite of the fact that she had laughed at Graham's blindness in falling into her trap, Molly Lafond felt enough curiosity to induce her to enter into several conversations with him during the course of that afternoon. He sat by the door whistling. Out in the sun the men cut logs, notched ends, heaved and pushed. The girl alternated between personal encouragement of the workers, and a curious examination of the idler.

Graham interested her because he puzzled her. The young man no longer held to the quizzical and cynical attitude he had assumed in the morning, but neither did he at once manifest that personal interest which she had imagined inevitable. He caught at her statement that she had done nothing but "read, read, read." In the course of twenty minutes he had made her most keenly aware of her deficiencies, and that without the display of any other motive than a frank desire to discuss the extent of her knowledge. He opened to her fields whose existence she had never suspected; he showed her that she had but superficially examined those she had entered. Authors she had much admired he disposed of cavalierly, and in their stead substituted others of whom she had never heard.

"I like Bulwer," she remarked, secure in her classic because it had been the only one of Sweeney's collection to come in a set and bound in brown leather.

"Bulwer, yes," said Graham, pulling his little moustache, and speaking, as his habit sometimes was, more to himself than to his companion. "We all go through that stage, but we get over it after awhile. You see, he's superficial and awfully pedantic. There is much beauty in it, too. I remember in one of his novels—I forget which—there is a picture of a child tossing her ball skyward, with eyes turned upward to the skies, that is worth a good deal."

"It's in What Will He Do with It?" cried Molly, aglow at being able to interpolate correctly.

"Yes," assented Graham, indifferently. "It has something to do with youth, I think. Before our critical judgment grows up and finds him out, there is a peculiar elevation about Bulwer's themes and treatment. His world is blown; but it is big, and his figures have a certain scornful nobility about them. If I were to compete with the gentleman under discussion," he concluded, with a slight laugh, "I would say that he throws upon the true gold of youthful ideals, hopes, and dreams, the light of his own tinsel."

Molly was subdued, humbled. She was deprived at a stroke of all her weapons. For the first time she found herself looking up to a man, and wondering whether she could ever meet him on terms of equality. She caught herself covertly scrutinizing Graham to see if he too realized his advantage. He was genuinely interested; that was all. He seemed to take it for granted that she was already on his level. This encouraged her somewhat.

Whenever she again joined the group of sweating men at work on her house, she felt subtly that she was returning from a far country. She had brought back with her something new. The nature of the conversation had lifted her to the contemplation of fresh possibilities of human intercourse. With a defiant toss of the head she indulged herself to the extent of imagining several Bulwer-like conversations, in which she dealt out brilliant generalities to the universal applause. It was the first flight her wings had essayed; the first charm not merely physical that she had experienced with one of the other sex. She felt she was going to like this man Graham.

And yet that very elation was one of the reasons why, after dinner in the "hotel," she walked with Billy Knapp, although Graham was plainly waiting for her. It had been her first flight; her wings were tired. The reaction had come.

The dinner itself, and its manner, had much to do with bringing this to her consciousness. Entering at one end of the hotel dining-room, she first became aware of the cook stove at the other, and, behind it, tins. Down the centre extended the three bench-flanked board tables, polished smooth by the combined influences of spilled grease and much rubbing. At certain short intervals had been stationed tin plates, over each of which were stacked, pyramid fashion, an iron knife, fork and spoon. Tin cups spaced the plates. Down the centre of each table were distributed thick white china receptacles containing sugar, lumpy and brown with coffee; salt; and butter on the point of melting. At dinner-time the cook placed between these receptacles capacious tins, steaming respectively, with fried and boiled pork, boiled potatoes, cornmeal mush, and canned tomatoes; besides corn bread, soda biscuits, and a small quantity of milk for the coffee. Then, wiping his glistening face on the red-checked little towel that hung at his waist, he entered the "office" and, seizing a huge bell, clanged forth, now to the right, now to the left, that his meal was ready.

The men ate in their shirt sleeves, those farthest half obscured by the clouds of steam from the uncovered dishes. The cook stove, the dishes, and the men heated the low unventilated room almost to suffocation. They gobbled their food rapidly, taking noisy swigs of the coffee from the tin cups. As each finished, he wiped his plate clean with the soft inside of a soda biscuit, drew his knife across the bread once or twice, swallowed the gravy-laden biscuit at one mouthful, and departed without further ceremony into the outer air.

It was all thoroughly Western, thoroughly material, thoroughly restful to tired wings.

As the meal progressed, the exaltation faded slowly. Molly received the assiduous attentions of everybody. After dinner, as has been said, she and the wonderful Billy Knapp disappeared into the twilight, leaving the disconsolate miners to find their way to the Little Nugget when it pleased them to do so.

Billy talked. He poured out his confidences. He told how great was Billy, how bright were Billy's prospects, how important were Billy's responsibilities. He was glad to show this young girl the town; it was Billy's town. He was pleased to tell her the names of the hills hereabouts; these hills concealed within their depths the veins of Billy's lodes. He delighted in giving the history of the men they met; for these men looked up to Billy as the architect of their future forties. He spoke enthusiastically of the prospects.

"Thar is a lode," said he earnestly, "over on the J.G. fraction that's shore th' purtiest bit of quartz lead you ever see. The walls is all of slate, running jest's slick side by side, with a clear vein between 'em, and she'll run 'way up, free millin'. I tell you what, Miss Molly, thar's big money in it, thar shorely is! When I get those Easte'n capitalists interested, and ready to put a little salt in, and git up a few mills and necessary buildin's, you'll jest see things hummin' in this yar kentry."

Out of the darkness a silent little figure glided and fell in step with the girl.

"Hullo, bub," said Billy indifferently, and went on to tell what he was going to do. Billy had great plans.

Molly said nothing to the new member of their party, but she reached out her hand and patted the little cotton-covered shoulder. She looked about at the dark town and the hills, and drew a deep breath. This was real, tangible. She felt at home in it, and she was adequate to all that its conditions might bring forth. Above all, she was confident here. Graham and his ideas seemed to her at the moment quite nebulous and phantom-like.

"Let's go to the Little Nugget," she suggested suddenly.

They turned to retrace their steps. As they passed an open doorway, a big man darted out with unnatural agility and seized the Kid by the scruff of the neck.

"I beg your pardon, miss, whom I am overjoyed to meet. Standing as I do in loco parentis, the claims of the rising generation constrain me to postpone that more intimate acquaintance which your attractions demand of my desire. Come along here, you!" and he dragged the Kid, struggling and crying out, into the dark cabin.

"Ain't he great?" cried Billy, with real enthusiasm. "Ain't he just? They ain't a man in th' whole Northwest as can sling the langwidge that man can when he tries. You just ought to see him when he cuts loose, you just ought."

"Who is he?" asked Molly.

"Him? What, him? He's Moroney!"

His tone denied the need of further question. They entered the saloon.

The first half hour of Molly's evening in the Little Nugget was constrained. Up to this point she had met the men of the camp under extraordinary circumstances. Now she was called upon to face them in their time of relaxation and accustomed comfort. Such moments of leisure crystallize for us men everywhere our opinions of people. Anybody is welcome to sail with us, hunt with us, fish with us, ride with us, work with us, provided he is personally agreeable and understands the game. We are not so undiscriminating when it comes to a study fire and an easy chair. Translate the study fire and the easy chair to the Little Nugget and a quiet game, and you will see one reason for the constraint. No unkindness was intended. The situation was merely, but inevitably, awkward for everybody.

In such emergencies as this, where a creature of coarser fibre would fail, Molly's hereditary fineness of instinct stood her in good stead. She saw intuitively the attitude she should take. In the first place, she held herself in the background, left the lead to others, behaved as if she suspected herself of being an intruder; so that the men suddenly felt themselves very paternal and adoptive.

In the second place, she encouraged them to show off; which they did with the utmost heartiness. The first embarrassment wore away before long, and Molly took her place in the corner of the bar with the tacit approval of every man in the room.

The remainder of the evening was enjoyable. Some features of it would scarcely have impressed a refined Easterner favorably, for these were rough men, with crude tastes and passions. Once having accepted the girl as one of themselves, they lapsed to some extent, though not entirely, into their accustomed manner. It is a little difficult sometimes to interpret the West in terms of the East. An act which in the older country would be significant of too licensed freedom, on the frontier is a matter of course. Everything depends on the point of view and the attitude of mind.

Around Molly Lafond seethed a constantly changing group of men. They joked boisterously at one another and at her. The standard of wit was the saying of insulting things with a laugh that showed that the remark held in itself something of facetious sarcasm. Through thinner skins it would have bitten cruelly. Behind this lively group sat another, more silent, smoking the amused pipe of contemplation, all alert to the chances of conversational battle, ready to jump up and enter the lists whenever a bright idea suggested itself. In the corner just behind the bar, lurked Black Mike, keeping a sinister eye on Frosty's dispensations. The faro dealer called his cards imperturbably over his scantily patronized game. Occasionally someone, glowing with the good-natured excitement of jesting, would break away from the laughing group, and, standing the while, would stake a few red chips on a turn or so of the cards.

Peter, obsessed of some sudden and doggish affection, ceased his restless wanderings. He took up his position, resting on one hip, both hind legs to one side, directly beneath Molly's feet. There his shaggy head was of such a height that the girl could just reach it with the point of her shoe. From time to time, when the exigency demanded such a pose, she looked down prettily, and stirred the animal's button ears with her little foot. On such occasions Peter gravely rolled his eyes upward and wriggled his stump of a tail.

A young fellow by the name of Dave Kelly stood nearest her. He was a handsome young fellow, with a laughing boyish face. As time went on, he became more and more elated and sure of himself. Occasionally, when the press of men behind would push him forward, he would reach across the girl to regain his balance. Once he put his hand lightly on the point of her shoulder. He paused, with a strange delicious thrill at the feel of the round young arm under the loose stuff of the gown, which slipped beneath his grasp to emphasize the smoothness of the skin. Aware of the touch, she looked toward him for a minute, laughing. Somehow it gave him a strange feeling of intimacy with her, inexplicable, subtle. Without knowing why he did so, he felt his own shoulder underneath his loose flannel shirt. It gave the same impression, only rougher, coarser.

There suddenly sprang into his mind a sense of physical kinship between himself and her. He took frequent opportunities of repeating the contact, always lightly, always with the same delicious thrill. At each touch the girl turned to him for a vaguely smiling instant. She was absorbed in the men about her. The youth at her side had fallen silent, but her good nature extended to everybody.

Late in the evening somebody suggested that Frosty had been singularly unemployed. Glasses were filled. Molly's was handed to her.

"I don't want any," said she.

"It'll do y' good," "Try her," "Aw, come on!" urged a dozen voices.

She sipped a little. It tasted to her like liquid fire, with a strange gagging property as it reached the region of the epiglottis. She sputtered and choked.

"Ugh!" she shuddered. "Ugh! I couldn't get a glass of that stuff down if it killed me." She shut her eyes and shivered with a pretty disgust. "I simply can't," she repeated.

"Ain't ye got anything else, Frosty?" they cried reproachfully. "That stuff's purty rank fer a lady, that's right. Skirmish around thar, an' see what y' kin discover."

Frosty skirmished around, and finally bobbed up, red-faced, with a bottle of some light wine. Molly drank this slowly, with little more satisfaction. Some people never care for the taste of anything with alcohol in it, and the cheap wine had more than the suspicion of a wire edge. But she liked the warm glow that followed, and she found that in a moment or so she was much pleased with herself.

"Give me another of those," she smiled to Frosty, holding out the empty glass. The men chuckled. This was something like.

Molly drank the other glass. In a few minutes she felt sleepy. "I'm going to turn in," she said abruptly, and slid down on the unsuspecting Peter. They disentangled the trouble with merriment. Molly consoled Peter. The room was full of noise and light.

"May I take you over?" Kelly was asking in her ear. She nodded assent. The other men looked chagrined. It had not occurred to them.

Dave Kelly and Molly stepped gayly from the heated, garish saloon into the still night. The contrast made them feel yet gayer. They remarked on the stars and the moon, to do which it became necessary to look upward and slacken their steps. He was very close to her. He slipped his arm about her waist, his great hand resting firmly beneath her small bust, and they stumbled on together in breathless silence. He felt very bold and elated and happy.

Suddenly she looked down with an air of mock surprise. "What is this?" she cried, lifting one of Dave's fingers and letting it fall. "Why, it looks like your hand!"

"That's so!" grinned Dave.

"I wonder how that could have got there!"

Dave, finding himself unequal to persiflage, made no reply. She nestled up to him a little and sighed. She liked it. She had not the slightest idea that there was anything out of the way in it. Why should she? Morals, as we understand them, she had never been taught. They slowly approached the wagon, which during the day had been dragged to a less conspicuous but more distant locality.

Ah, Molly, Molly, those wings are very tired!

At the moment when Kelly first pressed the girl to him, he experienced a sudden lessening of her charm. It was not that she was less feminine, or that, in his eyes, she had lost any moral excellence by her easy surrender. Dave had probably as rudimentary ideas of the finer moralities as Molly herself. But one very definite element of her attraction had been given up—that of mystery, of remoteness, of difference between herself and him. She was no longer a creature of a wonderful and other sphere; she had become the female of his species.

All this was subtle and slight and quite unappreciated and unanalyzed by Dave himself. But the keen intuition of the girl discovered it. She felt the difference. Suddenly she became aware of the fact that whatever a woman gives to a man takes something from her attraction, and adds something to his. With the discovery, she resolutely put his hand away.

"That's enough of that," she said in the sensible voice which some women use so effectually.

Dave, unwilling to let the sensation go before he had drained it, attempted to seize her by force. She slipped away and ran like a deer to her wagon, gleaming white through the darkness. Dave sprang in pursuit. At the instant Peter, who had followed unperceived, leaped with a growl and fastened his teeth into Dave's cowhide boot. The miner paused a moment undecided, and then, his natural good nature coming to his rescue, he laughed. An answering laugh echoed from the direction of the wagon.

"That's a pretty trick," he called, trying to disengage Peter's jaws. Peter shook his head savagely and growled.

"You ought to learn to run," came the voice from the safety of the wagon.

"Run!" laughed Dave. "Run with a dawg hangin' to you? Call him and see if you can get him to leave go."

"Dog?" repeated the voice in puzzled tones.

"Yes, dog—this yere Peter. He seems to have took up with you-all. He's got me by th' laig!"

Molly reappeared cautiously. Then she saw Peter, and advanced boldly. The two young people looked at the eager and determined little dog, and laughed with great good nature. Their crisis had passed, fortunately without harm to either. Molly took Peter by the collar. Peter at once let go.

"Good night," said Molly decidedly to Dave.

"Good night," said Dave, and turned back.

Molly walked on to the wagon, closely followed by Peter. As she climbed in, she turned and caught sight of the little animal, eyeing her wistfully.

"Want to come in?" said she.

Peter jumped to the whiffletree, then upon the seat, then into the wagon. Molly followed.

"Peter," said she, "we won't do that any more. I don't believe it's a good scheme. What do you think, dog?"

Peter wagged his stump of a tail, but as it was quite dark, this expression of approval was lost. "I hope he won't say anything about it," she went on reflectively. "But if he does"—she tossed her head—"much good may it do any of them!" Then, after some time, "Peter, let's go to sleep."

Peter whined with content.

XIX

THE BROAD WHITE ROAD

Copper Creek had begun as a half-way house, and had ended as a camp. Thus the hotel was its oldest structure.

Situated about half way between Rockerville and Custer, on the old Spring Creek trail, it often happened that the stage running from Rapid to the last-named town would stop for the evening meal, or even for the night, at the little log structure which Bill Martin had been sagacious enough to erect there. The soil was good for potatoes, which was lucky, for Bill Martin could never have prospered as a hotel keeper pure and simple; because purity, simplicity, and temperance principles have nothing to do with a Western inn. Bill cooked, made beds, and raised potatoes. Then a fortuitous "grub staker" discovered the Great Snake lode. A town sprang up in the night, so Bill Martin hired Black Jack and built additions. And finally, since his food was good and cheap, it came to be the proper thing to eat late dinners at two dollars a week in the long dining-room of Bill Martin's new building. After the Little Nugget, a later but more enterprising venture, Bill Martin's Prairie Dog, with its small office, its big eating room, its little square bedrooms above the office, and its ancient and musty copies of distant journals, was acknowledged to be the most important institution of the place.

From the narrow, roofless stoop its proprietor looked out tranquilly on the growth of the camp. He was a tall, cadaverous, facetious individual, slightly stooped, with thin impassive face, deep eyes, and a beard that seemed always just two days old. He spoke with a drawl that was at first natural, but later, as the quaint old fellow grew to appreciate its humorous qualities, it took on a faint color of affectation. He adopted always the paternal attitude, as was clearly his right.

Bill Martin was probably the only man who could have told you the history of Copper Creek, for he had been, through all of its changes of population, the one stable character. First came the original "grub staker" and a score more like him—impecunious, giving, many of them, their labor and experience, in exchange for tools and provisions furnished them by a speculator in the towns. The speculator took half of what was found. These men were hardy, bold, enduring, skilful. They grubbed about in the hills with the keen restless instinct of ants over a mould of earth, moving rapidly, pausing often, lighting finally, with an accuracy that to the outsider would have seemed something preternatural, on the one quartz vein of the many, or the one significant lead in the multitude of systems that seamed the country in all directions. Thereupon they staked out claims with white pine posts, and blasted little troughs to show milk-white quartz or red ore filling. And finally they disappeared, like bats before daylight, leaving not an echo of themselves to recall their presence to the hills in which they had toiled.

Their places were taken by the speculator, the miner with a little money, the small capitalist willing to invest and not unwilling to work with his own hands. These men paid a certain modest amount to the first discoverers for the chance to take chances on the embryo mines. The prospector never had the patience to wait, or scheme, or develop, to the justification of a better price. The excitement of the chase was his. He was a master who sketched, in bold comprehensive strokes, the design of a work which men patient in the little details must fill in with color and value. Having thus outlined the lifetimes of men, the prosperity of the whole great industry that was to be, he was content to move on to where a new and virgin country offered a fresh canvas to his creative genius. He was always poor, but he never pitied himself.

The new owner, then, represented the investor. He expected no immediate returns. He was willing to wait. Meanwhile he spent as much time in going over the fifty thousand square yards of his one claim as his predecessor had in examining the whole twenty-five hundred square miles of the district. He carefully analyzed the lead, its tendencies, its virtues, its defects. When he had fully satisfied his mind, he sank neat, square-timbered shafts, from fifty to two hundred feet in depth, from which ramified tunnels, both across and along the drift. The débris he piled outside, without attempting to save its value. In this manner, gradually, he came to possess points of view from which the next purchaser of the claim could plainly see its worth and possibilities.

For this second proprietor never expected to make his profit from the ore. That accrued later, and to another man. When the country became a little known, the other man would happen along; he, in his turn, would be willing to invest; and the present holder of the property, the middleman in this queerly constructed industry, could measure the success of his undertaking by the difference between the price he had paid to the original "grub staker" and the price he now received from the future developer. Meanwhile, he worked hard with his hands.

Thus the camp presented the phenomenon of a community prospering on nothing more tangible than hope. When the cabins began to crowd thicker and thicker between the walls of the little gulch, Bill Martin had been forced to give up agriculture because of lack of room; so that Copper Creek produced absolutely nothing, not even potatoes. Every cent of its present and actual value came from outside, either with the men themselves, or with some investor who brought in the price of wages for a contemplated improvement. Only as long as there existed in men's minds the comparative certainty of a future stamp mill, by which the quartz could be made to give up its treasure, would the machinery of life run well. Hope depended on confidence.

The miners built themselves cabins in which to live, and so there came into being a town. It was a dusty, new little town; but venerable in its age—old air from the first. The cabins themselves were low and dark, flanking the street closely, a sort of monotone of brown, by which the stable, the saloon, and the hotel were thrown into stronger relief; the one by virtue of its wide-open door, the other two because of their porch and painted front respectively. These structures held the eye. One noticed the cane chairs on the stoop; the bench outside the saloon; the dumped down saddles, the hay dust, the lazy loafers about the stable. And always one drew aside instinctively to the edge of the broad, white, dusty street, as if to let pass a horse race, or a train of cars, or something equally swift and irresistible.

The camp lived on each side of that river of blinding white; never in it. Later, perhaps, when Copper Creek reached the industrial or producing stage, and became domestic, it would be a Rubicon over which contending armies of small boys would dispute the supremacy of the north and south side of the town. Now it wore a constant air of being quite empty. Perhaps nothing was more characteristic, struck the eye more forcibly, lingered longer in the memory as the dominant note in the impressionistic picture of the place, than this single silent road; not even the sombre cabins, or the great pine-clad hills, or the clear mountain air imparting a quality of its own to the very appearance of things, or the little singing brook that ran behind one row of cabins and the stable, or the eagles wheeling and screaming so far up in the blue Western sky. The town seemed to draw back on either side of the road to avoid spoiling its effect, over-awed by it, humbled by its dignified solemnity. Copper Creek would have been willing to have its history recounted by that road, which was primarily, indeed, the cause of its being.

And Bill Martin, in the cane chair of his stoop, the only man capable of recounting that history, owed most of his unique knowledge of events to the ancient thoroughfare. Men came from the lower gulch, abode their brief hour, and disappeared into the thin air of the upper curve. From one wing, across the white stage, out by the other wing, the actors changed; the setting remained always the same.

Now each morning early the old innkeeper saw defile before his windows the Optimist, intent on developing his dream. A motley crew, these Optimists, having little in common with one another but the inner spirit of hope. There was Old Mizzou, short, squat, grizzled, good-natured, with back-sloping, bald forehead, and a seven dollar suit of clothes, from which he suffered severely, because it was "store made." He owned a little claim over beyond Ragged Top, on which he made infinitesimal progress. No one seemed to believe it amounted to much, Old Mizzou least of all, but he was old, and he had lived the life, and so he liked to amuse himself still in playing at the game; contented to chip away a few slivers of rock in order to persuade himself that he was a miner, to sip a little whiskey so that men might honor him as a drinker, to talk so loudly from his warm corner in the Little Nugget that the sound of his voice might persuade him he was a bold bad man; although everyone knew that Old Mizzou had never harmed a fly.

And then again, there was Jack Graham, the Easterner, but never the tenderfoot. His selections of claims had been judicious. He was not afraid of work. He had the good sense of the timely word, so the men trusted and liked him, even though he was college-bred and quiet-mannered and a little aloof.

And again, there was Dave Kelly, who was red-cheeked, and blushed, but was a good man for all that; and Cheyenne Harry, who owned two claims and never did any work on them; and Houston, the strongest man in the camp; and, of course, the great Moroney. These, and a hundred like them, were actual miners, wielding sledge, drill and pick. Besides them were others—Frosty, and the faro man, and Bill Martin, and the stable boys, and the proprietor of the New York Emporium, all of whom lived in ministering to the wants of a prosperity that was still in the air.

Each morning the camp emptied itself into the hills. The claims were usually held in partnership; when they were not, two of the men "traded work," so that they could labor in pairs. At rude forges near the shafts they sharpened their heavy steel drills, resembling crowbars, beating the red-hot point out with the sledges. Then one held, while the other struck—crash! Turn, crash! Turn, crash! And so on, in unwearying succession, until the hole became so clogged with the powdered rock and the water poured in to cool the drill, that it had to be spooned out with a special T-shaped instrument.

After a time the hole would be deep enough. The operators would load it, touch the fuse, scamper for shelter. The earth would become cumbered with broken vein matter, and this had to be removed laboriously with pick and shovel. When the shaft grew deeper, the fuse was cut a little longer, and the miners would climb out as fast as they could on a notched pole. Cases have been known when that was not fast enough; as the time old Brady, the paralytic, was blown out along with the vein filling, and died almost before the horse was saddled to go for the doctor at Custer, fifteen miles away.

The rock was hard and the immediate results invisible. Well earned was the title of Optimist, for that these coarse, untrained men should so devote themselves to a futurity certainly indicated optimism, and of a fine sort. If the capitalist should not come! The net result would be a few acres of hilly stony land, a well hole where there was no water, and an exhausted pocket-book.

At noon some of the miners ate a lunch which they had brought with them, heating coffee over the little fire used to warm the powder; while others picked up something in their own cabins. Bill Martin's table entertained only the gambler, Graham, Cheyenne Harry, and two other men, whom the camp laughingly designated as "proud." About four or five o'clock, the workers returned from the claims. At six sharp Black Jack served dinner to the entire camp. Then came the Little Nugget, a quiet smoke, a glass or so of whiskey, and a sound night's sleep.

Sometimes there was a celebration. One or two members of the little community were inclined to become a trifle over joyous too often for their health. The standard of humor and manners was not one of the most quiet and delicate. But, on the whole, Copper Creek was no worse nor better than a hundred other similar prospecting camps in the West.

Naturally, to such a community, in the hobbledehoy stage of its development, as it were, the advent of so strange a phenomenon as a woman was in the nature of an event. Later, when it had become used to the sex and its possibilities and limitations, the personal relation might become the motive of much very complicated action; but now it accepted Molly as a bright spot of color on a gray canvas, as a holiday, as a fortuitous bit of music, as an unexpected burst of sunshine in the winter. For all her strong feminine charm, she was to most of them as sexless as a boy. They were too many; and she was alone. The spectacle of one gigantic rivalry for her favor would have been grotesque, and no one has a keener instinctive sense of the ridiculous than the Westerner. They accepted her fascination as a real but impersonal influence. In her they honored the great abstraction, woman; and in himself each individual saw, not his own single personality, but the blended apotheosis of the man of Copper Creek. Molly was held in partnership, each miner making not only his own impression for her good graces, but the camp's as well.

And this without mawkish sentimentality or comic opera delicacy of conduct. It must not be understood that the newcomer became any romantic idol of the camp, or that the men displayed the old-fashioned courtesy affected by the miners in Western romances. These were pioneers. Their lives were rough, and their conduct matched their lives. When angry, they said very emphatic things in inelegant language. When facetious, their jokes were apt to be as broad as the prairies themselves. When at their ease, they chewed tobacco, or ate with their knives, or forgot to wash their shirts that week, or sat in their shirt sleeves with the collars of said garment wide open. But they never equalled the frankness of a Parisian soirée in talking of or joking at some natural but usually unmentioned functions of life; nor were they ever without that solid bedrock of good nature which is the American's saving grace. Molly Lafond led a safe life among them because she trusted them. In the face of that trust no one of them conceived the possibility of harming her. This feeling was personal however. Nobody would have felt called upon to protect her against anyone who did conceive the possibility. In other words, she took just the independent position in the community which would have been accorded to a man coming in from outside. She was a good comrade.

In her elation at finally escaping the restrictions and petty bickerings of her life at the Indian agency, Molly had turned eagerly first of all to the conquest of the masculine heart. This was theory, built up from a long course of romantic reading. The heroine always "ruled her little court." Molly would like to rule her little court also. She felt the genuineness of her fascination, the possession of which she realized to the full degree—that sort of fascination which succeeds where beauty, intellect, spirituality fail. It was a power, great, untried, unmeasured. Naturally her first impulse was to test it, to use it. She luxuriated in it. Nothing could be more delightful than to command and be obeyed; to smile into answering, smiling faces; to frown and see swiftly, as in a mirrored reflection, the countenances about her become dark. That was natural.

But after a little she found herself tiring of it. The game was too easy. Even from the first evening, when she had astounded and subdued the whole community at one fell blow, she had never experienced the slightest difficulty in getting these men to like her. Why should she? She was young and pretty and dainty, and delicately commanding and winsome, and she knew instinctively each man's weak point. One and all gave her unqualified approbation. There is no fun in asserting yourself, if everyone agrees with you; and to be a queen you must maintain your dignity and aloofness. It was a pose. You cannot be hail-fellow with your subjects.

So little by little, as the joy of out door life got into her veins, as it does into the veins of every healthy young creature in the open air of the Hills, she dropped the coquette. Then she first began to appreciate the real charm of things, and she was perfectly happy. Not a tiny cloud of regret veiled the tiniest corner of her skies.

The cabin had been finished within the week, but under the advice of the builders she did not move into it until nearly a month later.

A new shack never dries thoroughly in less than three weeks; and, besides, the sawdust from the new insect borings always pours down from the walls and ceilings in aggravating abundance. A dozen other houses were placed at her disposal. The men were only too glad to double up temporarily. But the summer air was warm, and Molly was by now as used to the narrow confines of her canvas-top, as a yachtsman to the cabin of his boat. She declined their offers and continued to live in the wagon. She was quite content to wait thus. In the meantime she took much delight in fixing up various curtains, chaircovers and tablecloths from light fabrics unearthed at the New York Emporium, and in cultivating carefully boxes of geraniums, almost the only garden flower in the hills. Curiously enough she enjoyed this. Perhaps it was a hereditary bequest from her unsuspected New England ancestry.

Jack Graham lent her many books, which she perused greedily. She had never seen a large city, or a boat, or a trolley car, or a tailor-made gown; but that counted little. Such things are not so much matters of actual experience as of natural aptitude. Some people can go to Europe and get less out of it than do those who read steamer advertisements at home. Molly Lafond was keen of intellect and vivid of imagination, by the aid of which two qualities she constructed for herself a culture—real, in spite of the fact that it was somewhat ill-balanced.

She spent much of her time out of doors, but the road and the gulch saw little of her. Her delight was to strike directly back across the brook, and up the overgrown hill, to the vast pine-clad heights above. There the castellated dikes frowned like mediaeval ramparts; the pine needles were soft and slippery and fragrant underfoot; the breeze swept by on swift wings, humming songs of the distant prairie; the little squirrels chattered and the big squirrels barked; the sun shone silver clear; and below, far down, the summits of other hills dropped away and away like the tiers of some enormous amphitheatre, until the brown prairie suddenly flowed out from underneath and rose to the level of the eye. It was very far from everything up there. And then one could go through the dikes down into Juniper Gulch, where one would find a whole group of claims and one's friends at work on them.

Molly grew to be an expert in the dip of quartz. She was accustomed to perch on a neighboring dikelet, near a claim, where she could enjoy the breeze, and converse without too much effort. There she looked charming, and bothered the workers a little. All workers like to be bothered a little. It is a wise woman who does not bother them too much. The attention is flattering as long as it is not annoying. When the men were below the surface of the ground she shouted down the shaft and insisted on a ride in the bucket. Or she rambled long delicious hours with Peter and the Kid, from whom she learned the philosophy of hindsights and the pregnant possibilities of holes under tree roots. These two adored her beyond all measure. The homely, bristle-whiskered animal was always at her heels; the Kid was ever ready to waste precious cartridges on her behalf.

They did much elaborate stalking after grouse, rabbits, and squirrels. Most of these approaches failed, for the reason that they were too elaborate and too eager. Wild creatures seem to be sensitive to telepathic influences. A stolid Indian, whose fatalism does not permit him to become much excited, can often walk directly up to a flock of ducks, when a white man with a breech-loading gun and a desire for a bag could not sneak within fifty rods. Instance also the well known and uncanny knowledge of the common crow as to your possession of firearms. His proneness to distant flight when you are armed, and his sublime indifference to your approach when you are not, may arise not from a recognition of the instrument, but from a reading of the desire for his slaughter.

Be this as it may, the bagging of game was a rare enough event to throw all three into wild excitement. Usually, a grand rush was made in the direction of the fallen. Peter arrived first, and danced, tip-toed, bristle-backed. Molly and the Kid were not far behind. Then came shouts of proud joy and feminine shrieks at the gore. The story was detailed again and again of just how the shot was made. Peter agonized that he could not talk. Finally the grouse or squirrel was borne proudly down to fierce-moustached Black Jack, the cook, who expostulated and grumbled.

"G' 'way, you two!" he growled. "Git out; don't want you around! Goin' t' bake! Vamoose! Ain't hired t' skin no squirrels or pluck no birds. Cyan't be bothered. G' 'way, you two." Black Jack always talked like this—in short, disconnected sentences.

Then the girl would beg prettily, while the Kid, fully aware in whom dwelt the most effective persuasion, stood by, and Peter snuffed around in the forbidden kitchen. And finally Black Jack would yield, with a vast show of bad grace.

"All right, all right!" he would cry, shaking his great head. "Just this once. Never again, mind you, never again. Cyan't be bothered. Wouldn't do it now, only just t' get rid of that dawg. That's it. Cyan't have no dawg around. Cyan't nohow."

He took the partridge or squirrel, still grumbling.

"Oh, thank you, dear good Mr. Black Jack!" cried Molly. "And you'll save me the wings and tail or the skin, won't you?"

At this point Black Jack always exploded violently and bundled them out, taking a neatly avoided kick at Peter. Then he would watch them quite out of sight, after which he would expend the utmost care in the concoction of wonderful stews or potpies.

These clear, sunshiny, healthy days tanned Molly's skin to a golden brown, brightened her eye and her smile, and filled her strong young body with abounding health and vitality. Even her evenings did not in any way cloud her spirits. They were of bad influence, but why should she know that? She was a delicious little animal, keen, shrewd, of good impulses, though her moral nature was quite untrained. She possessed instincts—strong instincts—which seemed arbitrarily to place a limit beyond which she did not dream of going; but that, she thought, was because she did not care to go. The question of right or wrong, consciously chosen, never entered her calculations. Her only standard was her desire—and, perhaps a little, what Graham would think of her—but she did not bother her head one way or the other. She was happy, and was doing nothing she regretted. That was enough.

And yet the evenings were not good—not good at all. They were bound to exercise a certain deleterious influence.

By habit, Molly spent her time after dark on a corner of the bar at the Little Nugget saloon. There she received attention. The peculiarity of her position lay in the fact that her good comradeship had dissipated constraint. The men talked and drank and gambled about as usual. It must be repeated that the girl was in no sense a romantic "idol of the camp." The miners would have been well enough pleased if she had drunk her whiskey with them as freely as they did with each other. As she did not, they merely put the fact down to personal idiosyncrasy, like Dave Williams' horror of cooked rabbit. Rough men do not demand the finer virtues, and she was treated to the reverse side of this idea. She saw what men call life. She learned the game of faro and how men act who have won or lost at it. She gained a knowledge of the strength of whiskey and what men say who have drunk of it. She heard loose speech; she saw loose conduct. All this is not nice for a young girl.

The men felt especially drawn to her because she smoked paper cigarettes gracefully. About ten o'clock she went to bed.

These few days, between her first triumphant arrival and her establishment in her new cabin, were the most care-free and happy of her stay at Copper Creek. She lived thoughtlessly, conducting herself exactly as she pleased, entertaining no regrets, conscious of no sense of wrongdoing, and therefore of no sense of guilt. Then a little incident stirred into wakefulness that fine-wrought conscience which is an element of so many natures that draw their life from New England.

XX

THE EATING OF THE APPLE

One morning Molly found herself awakened very early by the sound of whistling just outside. She opened her eyes to discover Peter, who had occupied one end of the wagon, sitting, head and ears up, listening to the same sound. The whistling was young, tuneless. Finally she peered through the crack in the canvas.

Outside, on the wagon tongue, sat the Kid patiently waiting, his little rifle across his knees, one bare foot digging away at the dust, his lips puckered to cheerful sibilance, his wide gray eyes turning every once in awhile to the canvas cover of the schooner. He discovered Molly looking out. The whistle abruptly stopped.

"Come on out, Molly," said he. "I ben waiting for you a long time."

"My! it's so awful early!" yawned Molly. "What do you want to do?"

"I'm going to take you hunting," confided the Kid. "We perhaps can get a squirrel down the gulch, or perhaps a cotton-tail. Come on, hurry up!"

"Why, I ain't dressed yet," objected Molly.

"Well, dress!" said the Kid impatiently.

By this time she was well awake, and the glorious morning was getting into her lungs. Her eye disappeared, and in a few minutes she emerged fully clothed. The Kid looked her over.

"Y' ain't going that way?" he asked incredulously.

"Course not. You wait till I come back."

She stepped down on the whiffletree, her heavy waving hair falling in masses of curls and crinkles over her shoulders.

"Oh, Lord!" cried the Kid pathetically. In the entrance stood Peter, his head on one side. Molly laughed.

"I thought I'd got rid of him," complained the Kid, "and here he is!"

"Never mind," said Molly soothingly, "I can make him stand round. Come here, Peter!"

At the pool of the lower creek Molly knelt, turning back the sleeves from her white arms, loosening the dress from about her round young throat. After a little she leaned back against the mosses and piled the strands of her hair, watching the interested Kid with shining eyes.

"My, but you're purty!" he cried. She nodded to him, laughing.

They took their way down the gulch, walking soberly in the road, while Peter skirmished unrestrained among the possibilities of the thickets at either hand. In the judgment of the Kid, this was too near town for the best hunting. The Kid talked.

"You never been down here, have you?"

"No," replied Molly, "I've always been up in the hills, you know; it's more fun, I think. Do you think we'll find anything down here near the road?"

"Not just yet; but after we get by Bugchaser's—Say, you've never seen Bugchaser, then, have you?"

"No," laughed the girl, "I should think not. What in the world is Bugchaser?"

"It isn't a 'what'; it's a 'him.' He's crazy. He has a 'coon, and a bear, and a bobcat. I'd like to go up an' see 'em, but I'm scairt of him."

"Is he dangerous?" asked Molly.

"Pop says he eats little boys. Hoh! that ain't so, of course. But he's crazy, you know."

"What makes you think so?"

"He chases bugs with a fishnet."

"Oh!" cried Molly comprehendingly, and began to laugh.

The Kid looked at her with offended reproach.

"Well," he remarked finally, "you can do what you want; but you betcher life I'm keepin' away from him!"

His eyes were wide with childish wonder, strangely incongruous in this solemn, lonely little creature with his ways of early maturity and his ridiculous cut-down clothes.

"There, there," laughed Molly soothingly. "I wonder what's up with Peter!"

Peter was barking like a bunch of fire crackers.

"Sounds exciting!" said she. "Maybe it's a squirrel up a tree. Let's see!"

The Kid threw his rifle into the position of a most portentous ready, and the two entered the bushes. Peter was discovered, his hair bristling between his shoulders, jumping eagerly around some object which lay, invisible, on the ground. He snapped with excitement. The Kid ran forward with a shout. Molly picked her skirts up and followed with equal rapidity and considerably more grace. They nearly ran over a large coiled rattlesnake.