It is marvellous how sorrow shrinks when one is very healthy and very much occupied. Although poverty was her close companion, Catherine had no thought of it in this primitive manner of living. She had come out there, with the independence and determination of a Western woman, for the purpose of living at the least possible expense, and making the most she could while the baby was "getting out of her arms." That process has its pleasures, which every mother feels in spite of burdens, and the mind is happily dulled by nature's merciful provision. With a little child tugging at the breast, care and fret vanish, not because of the happiness so much as because of a certain mammal complacency, which is not at all intellectual, but serves its purpose better than the profoundest method of reasoning.

So without any very unbearable misery at her recent widowhood, this healthy young woman worked in field and house, cared for her little ones, milked the two cows out in the corral, sewed, sang, rode, baked, and was happy for very wholesomeness. Sometimes she reproached herself that she was not more miserable, remembering that long grave back in the unkempt little prairie cemetery, and she sat down to coax her sorrow into proper prominence. But the baby cooing at her from its bunk, the low of the cattle from the corral begging her to relieve their heavy bags, the familiar call of one of her neighbors from without, even the burning sky of the summer dawns, broke the spell of this conjured sorrow, and in spite of herself she was again a very hearty and happy young woman. Besides, if one has a liking for comedy, it is impossible to be dull on a Nebraska prairie. The people are a merrier divertissement than the theatre with its hackneyed stories. Catherine Ford laughed a good deal, and she took the three Johns into her confidence, and they laughed with her. There was Minerva Fitch, who insisted on coming over to tell Catherine how to raise her children, and who was almost offended that the children wouldn't die of sunstroke when she predicted. And there was Bob Ackerman, who had inflammatory rheumatism and a Past, and who confided the latter to Mrs. Ford while she doctored the former with homoeopathic medicines. And there were all the strange visionaries who came out prospecting, and quite naturally drifted to Mrs. Ford's cabin for a meal, and paid her in compliments of a peculiarly Western type. And there were the three Johns themselves. Catherine considered it no treason to laugh at them a little.

Yet at Waite she did not laugh much. There had come to be something pathetic in the constant service he rendered her. The beginning of his more particular devotion had started in a particular way. Malaria was very bad in the country. It had carried off some of the most vigorous on the prairie, and twice that summer Catherine herself had laid out the cold forms of her neighbors on ironing-boards, and, with the assistance of Bill Deems of Missourah, had read the burial service over them. She had averted several other fatal runs of fever by the contents of her little medicine-case. These remedies she dealt out with an intelligence that astonished her patients, until it was learned that she was studying medicine at the time that she met her late husband, and was persuaded to assume the responsibilities of matrimony instead of those of the medical profession.

One day in midsummer, when the sun was focussing itself on the raw pine boards of her shanty, and Catherine had the shades drawn for coolness and the water-pitcher swathed in wet rags, East Indian fashion, she heard the familiar halloo of Waite down the road. This greeting, which was usually sent to her from the point where the dipping road lifted itself into the first view of the house, did not contain its usual note of cheerfulness. Catherine, wiping her hands on her checked apron, ran out to wave a welcome; and Waite, his squat body looking more distorted than ever, his huge shoulders lurching as he walked, came fairly plunging down the hill.

"It's all up with Henderson!" he cried, as Catherine approached. "He's got the malery, an' he says he's dyin'."

"That's no sign he's dying, because he says so," retorted Catherine.

"He wants to see yeh," panted Waite, mopping his big ugly head. "I think he's got somethin' particular to say."

"How long has he been down?"

"Three days; an' yeh wouldn't know 'im."

The children were playing on the floor at that side of the house where it was least hot. Catherine poured out three bowls of milk, and cut some bread, meanwhile telling Kitty how to feed the baby.

"She's a sensible thing, is the little daughter," said Catherine, as she tied on her sunbonnet and packed a little basket with things from the cupboard. She kissed the babies tenderly, flung her hoe—her only weapon of defence—over her shoulder, and the two started off.

They did not speak, for their throats were soon too parched. The prairie was burned brown with the sun; the grasses curled as if they had been on a gridiron. A strong wind was blowing; but it brought no comfort, for it was heavy with a scorching heat. The skin smarted and blistered under it, and the eyes felt as if they were filled with sand. The sun seemed to swing but a little way above the earth, and though the sky was intensest blue, around about this burning ball there was a halo of copper, as if the very ether were being consumed in yellow fire.

Waite put some big burdock-leaves on Catherine's head under her bonnet, and now and then he took a bottle of water from his pocket and made her swallow a mouthful. She staggered often as she walked, and the road was black before her. Still, it was not very long before the oddly shaped shack of the three Johns came in sight; and as he caught a glimpse of it, Waite quickened his footsteps.

"What if he should be gone?" he said, under his breath.

"Oh, come off!" said Catherine, angrily. "He's not gone. You make me tired!"

But she was trembling when she stopped just before the door to compose herself for a moment. Indeed, she trembled so very much that Waite put out his sprawling hand to steady her. She gently felt the pressure tightening, and Waite whispered in her ear:

"I guess I'd stand by him as well as anybody, excep' you, Mis' Ford. He's been my bes' friend. But I guess you like him better, eh?"

Catherine raised her finger. She could hear Henderson's voice within; it was pitiably querulous. He was half sitting up in his bunk, and Gillispie had just handed him a plate on which two cakes were swimming in black molasses and pork gravy. Henderson looked at it a moment; then over his face came a look of utter despair. He dropped his head in his arms and broke into uncontrolled crying.

"Oh, my God, Gillispie," he sobbed, "I shall die out here in this wretched hole! I want my mother. Great God, Gillispie, am I going to die without ever seeing my mother?"

Gillispie, maddened at this anguish, which he could in no way alleviate, sought comfort by first lighting his pipe and then taking his revolver out of his hip-pocket and playing with it. Henderson continued to shake with sobs, and Catherine, who had never before in her life heard a man cry, leaned against the door for a moment to gather courage. Then she ran into the house quickly, laughing as she came. She took Henderson's arms away from his face and laid him back on the pillow, and she stooped over him and kissed his forehead in the most matter-of-fact way.

"That's what your mother would do if she were here," she cried, merrily. "Where's the water?"

She washed his face and hands a long time, till they were cool and his convulsive sobs had ceased. Then she took a slice of thin bread from her basket and a spoonful of amber jelly. She beat an egg into some milk and dropped a little liquor within it, and served them together on the first clean napkin that had been in the cabin of the three Johns since it was built.

At this the great fool on the bed cried again, only quietly, tears of weak happiness running from his feverish eyes. And Catherine straightened the disorderly cabin. She came every day for two weeks, and by that time Henderson, very uncertain as to the strength of his legs, but once more accoutred in his native pluck, sat up in a chair, for which she had made clean soft cushions, writing a letter to his mother. The floor was scrubbed; the cabin had taken to itself cupboards made of packing-boxes; it had clothes-presses and shelves; curtains at the windows; boxes for all sort of necessaries, from flour to tobacco; and a cook-book on the wall, with an inscription within which was more appropriate than respectful.

The day that she announced that she would have no further call to come back, Waite, who was looking after the house while Gillispie was afield, made a little speech.

"After this here," he said, "we four stands er falls together. Now look here, there's lots of things can happen to a person on this cussed praira, and no one be none th' wiser. So see here, Mis' Ford, every night one of us is a-goin' to th' roof of this shack. From there we can see your place. If anything is th' matter—it don't signify how little er how big—you hang a lantern on th' stick that I'll put alongside th' house to-morrow. Yeh can h'ist th' light up with a string, and every mornin' before we go out we'll look too, and a white rag'll bring us quick as we can git there. We don't say nothin' about what we owe yeh, fur that ain't our way, but we sticks to each other from this on."

Catherine's eyes were moist. She looked at Henderson. His face had no expression in it at all. He did not even say good-by to her, and she turned, with the tears suddenly dried under her lids, and walked down the road in the twilight.

Weeks went by, and though Gillispie and Waite were often at Catherine's, Henderson never came. Gillispie gave it out as his opinion that Henderson was an ungrateful puppy; but Waite said nothing. This strange man, who seemed like a mere untoward accident of nature, had changed during the summer. His big ill-shaped body had grown more gaunt; his deep-set gray eyes had sunk deeper; the gentleness which had distinguished him even on the wild ranges of Montana became more marked. Late in August he volunteered to take on himself the entire charge of the night watch.

"It's nicer to be out at night," he said to Catherine. "Then you don't keep looking off at things; you can look inside;" and he struck his breast with his splay hand.

Cattle are timorous under the stars. The vastness of the plains, the sweep of the wind under the unbroken arch, frighten them; they are made for the close comforts of the barn-yard; and the apprehension is contagious, as every ranchman knows. Waite realized the need of becoming good friends with his animals. Night after night, riding up and down in the twilight of the stars, or dozing, rolled in his blanket, in the shelter of a knoll, he would hear a low roar; it was the cry of the alarmist. Then from every direction the cattle would rise with trembling awkwardness on their knees, and answer, giving out sullen bellowings. Some of them would begin to move from place to place, spreading the baseless alarm, and then came the time for action, else over the plain in mere fruitless frenzy would go the whole frantic band, lashed to madness by their own fears, trampling each other, heedless of any obstacle, in pitiable, deadly rout. Waite knew the premonitory signs well, and at the first warning bellow he was on his feet, alert and determined, his energy nerved for a struggle in which he always conquered.

Waite had a secret which he told to none, knowing, in his unanalytical fashion, that it would not be believed in. But soon as ever the dark heads of the cattle began to lift themselves, he sent a resonant voice out into the stillness. The songs he sang were hymns, and he made them into a sort of imperative lullaby. Waite let his lungs and soul fill with the breath of the night; he gave himself up to the exaltation of mastering those trembling brutes. Mounting, melodious, with even and powerful swing he let his full notes fall on the air in the confidence of power, and one by one the reassured cattle would lie down again, lowing in soft contentment, and so fall asleep with noses stretched out in mute attention, till their presence could hardly be guessed except for the sweet aroma of their cuds.

One night in the early dusk, he saw Catherine Ford hastening across the prairie with Bill Deems. He sent a halloo out to them, which they both answered as they ran on. Waite knew on what errand of mercy Catherine was bent, and he thought of the children over at the cabin alone. The cattle were quiet, the night beautiful, and he concluded that it was safe enough, since he was on his pony, to ride down there about midnight and see that the little ones were safe.

The dark sky, pricked with points of intensest light, hung over him so beneficently that in his heart there leaped a joy which even his ever-present sorrow could not disturb. This sorrow Waite openly admitted not only to himself, but to others. He had said to Catherine: "You see, I'll always hev to love yeh. An' yeh'll not git cross with me; I'm not goin' to be in th' way." And Catherine had told him, with tears in her eyes, that his love could never be but a comfort to any woman. And these words, which the poor fellow had in no sense mistaken, comforted him always, became part of his joy as he rode there, under those piercing stars, to look after her little ones. He found them sleeping in their bunks, the baby tight in Kitty's arms, the little boy above them in the upper bunk, with his hand in the long hair of his brown spaniel. Waite softly kissed each of them, so Kitty, who was half waking, told her mother afterwards, and then, bethinking him that Catherine might not be able to return in time for their breakfast, found the milk and bread, and set it for them on the table. Catherine had been writing, and her unfinished letter lay open beside the ink. He took up the pen and wrote,

"The childdren was all asleep at twelv.

"J. W."

He had not more than got on his pony again before he heard an ominous sound that made his heart leap. It was a frantic dull pounding of hoofs. He knew in a second what it meant. There was a stampede among the cattle. If the animals had all been his, he would not have lost his sense of judgment. But the realization that he had voluntarily undertaken the care of them, and that the larger part of them belonged to his friends, put him in a passion of apprehension that, as a ranchman, was almost inexplicable. He did the very thing of all others that no cattle-man in his right senses would think of doing. Gillispie and Henderson, talking it over afterward, were never able to understand it. It is possible—just barely possible—that Waite, still drunk on his solitary dreams, knew what he was doing, and chose to bring his little chapter to an end while the lines were pleasant. At any rate, he rode straight forward, shouting and waving his arms in an insane endeavor to head off that frantic mob. The noise woke the children, and they peered from the window as the pawing and bellowing herd plunged by, trampling the young steers under their feet.

In the early morning, Catherine Ford, spent both in mind and body, came walking slowly home. In her heart was a prayer of thanksgiving. Mary Deems lay sleeping back in her comfortless shack, with her little son by her side.

"The wonder of God is in it," said Catherine to herself as she walked home. "All the ministers of all the world could not have preached me such a sermon as I've had to-night."

So dim had been the light and so perturbed her mind that she had not noticed how torn and trampled was the road. But suddenly a bulk in her pathway startled her. It was the dead and mangled body of a steer. She stooped over it to read the brand on its flank. "It's one of the three Johns'," she cried out, looking anxiously about her. "How could that have happened?"

The direction which the cattle had taken was toward her house, and she hastened homeward. And not a quarter of a mile from her door she found the body of Waite beside that of his pony, crushed out of its familiar form into something unspeakably shapeless. In her excitement she half dragged, half carried that mutilated body home, and then ran up her signal of alarm on the stick that Waite himself had erected for her convenience. She thought it would be a long time before any one reached her, but she had hardly had time to bathe the disfigured face and straighten the disfigured body before Henderson was pounding at her door. Outside stood his pony panting from its terrific exertions. Henderson had not seen her before for six weeks. Now he stared at her with frightened eyes.

"What is it? What is it?" he cried. "What has happened to you, my—my love?"

At least afterward, thinking it over as she worked by day or tossed in her narrow bunk at night, it seemed to Catherine that those were the words he spoke. Yet she could never feel sure; nothing in his manner after that justified the impassioned anxiety of his manner in those first few uncertain moments; for a second later he saw the body of his friend and learned the little that Catherine knew. They buried him the next day in a little hollow where there was a spring and some wild aspens.

"He never liked the prairie," Catherine said, when she selected the spot. "And I want him to lie as sheltered as possible."

After he had been laid at rest, and she was back, busy with tidying her neglected shack, she fell to crying so that the children were scared.

"There's no one left to care what becomes of us," she told them, bitterly. "We might starve out here for all that any one cares."

And all through the night her tears fell, and she told herself that they were all for the man whose last thought was for her and her babies; she told herself over and over again that her tears were all for him. After this the autumn began to hurry on, and the snow fell capriciously, days of biting cold giving place to retrospective glances at summer. The last of the vegetables were taken out of the garden and buried in the cellar; and a few tons of coal—dear almost as diamonds—were brought out to provide against the severest weather. Ordinarily buffalo chips were the fuel. Catherine was alarmed at the way her wretched little store of money began to vanish. The baby was fretful with its teething, and was really more care than when she nursed it. The days shortened, and it seemed to her that she was forever working by lamp-light The prairies were brown and forbidding, the sky often a mere gray pall. The monotony of the life began to seem terrible. Sometimes her ears ached for a sound. For a time in the summer so many had seemed to need her that she had been happy in spite of her poverty and her loneliness. Now, suddenly, no one wanted her. She could find no source of inspiration. She wondered how she was going to live through the winter, and keep her patience and her good-nature.

"You'll love me," she said, almost fiercely, one night to the children—"you'll love mamma, no matter how cross and homely she gets, won't you?"

The cold grew day by day. A strong winter was setting in. Catherine took up her study of medicine again, and sat over her books till midnight. It occurred to her that she might fit herself for nursing by spring, and that the children could be put with some one—she did not dare to think with whom. But this was the only solution she could find to her problem of existence.

November settled down drearily. Few passed the shack. Catherine, who had no one to speak with excepting the children, continually devised amusements for them. They got to living in a world of fantasy, and were never themselves, but always wild Indians, or arctic explorers, or Robinson Crusoes. Kitty and Roderick, young as they were, found a never-ending source of amusement in these little grotesque dreams and dramas. The fund of money was getting so low that Catherine was obliged to economize even in the necessities. If it had not been for her two cows, she would hardly have known how to find food for her little ones. But she had a wonderful way of making things with eggs and milk, and she kept her little table always inviting. The day before Thanksgiving she determined that they should all have a frolic.

"By Christmas," she said to Kitty, "the snow may be so bad that I cannot get to town. We'll have our high old time now."

There is no denying that Catherine used slang even in talking to the children. The little pony had been sold long ago, and going to town meant a walk of twelve miles. But Catherine started out early in the morning, and was back by nightfall, not so very much the worse, and carrying in her arms bundles which might have fatigued a bronco.

The next morning she was up early, and was as happy and ridiculously excited over the prospect of the day's merrymaking as if she had been Kitty. Busy as she was, she noticed a peculiar oppression in the air, which intensified as the day went on. The sky seemed to hang but a little way above the rolling stretch of frost-bitten grass. But Kitty laughing over her new doll, Roderick startling the sullen silence with his drum, the smell of the chicken, slaughtered to make a prairie holiday, browning in the oven, drove all apprehensions from Catherine's mind. She was a common creature. Such very little things could make her happy. She sang as she worked; and what with the drumming of her boy, and the little exulting shrieks of her baby, the shack was filled with a deafening and exhilarating din.

It was a little past noon, when she became conscious that there was sweeping down on her a gray sheet of snow and ice, and not till then did she realize what those lowering clouds had signified. For one moment she stood half paralyzed. She thought of everything,—of the cattle, of the chance for being buried in this drift, of the stock of provisions, of the power of endurance of the children. While she was still thinking, the first ice-needles of the blizzard came peppering the windows. The cattle ran bellowing to the lee side of the house and crouched there, and the chickens scurried for the coop. Catherine seized such blankets and bits of carpet as she could find, and crammed them at windows and doors. Then she piled coal on the fire, and clothed the children in all they had that was warmest, their out-door garments included; and with them close about her, she sat and waited. The wind seemed to push steadily at the walls of the house. The howling became horrible. She could see that the children were crying with fright, but she could not hear them. The air was dusky; the cold, in spite of the fire, intolerable. In every crevice of the wretched structure the ice and snow made their way. It came through the roof, and began piling up in little pointed strips under the crevices. Catherine put the children all together in one bunk, covered them with all the bedclothes she had, and then stood before them defiantly, facing the west, from whence the wind was driving. Not suddenly, but by steady pressure, at length the window-sash yielded, and the next moment that whirlwind was in the house,—a maddening tumult of ice and wind, leaving no room for resistance; a killing cold, against which it was futile to fight. Catherine threw the bedclothes over the heads of the children, and then threw herself across the bunk, gasping and choking for breath. Her body would not have yielded to the suffering yet, so strongly made and sustained was it; but her dismay stifled her. She saw in one horrified moment the frozen forms of her babies, now so pink and pleasant to the sense; and oblivion came to save her from further misery.

She was alive—just barely alive—when Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The children lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, although the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. Stiff and suffering as these young fellows were, it was no easy matter to get the window back into place and re-light the fire. They had tied flasks of liquor about their waists; and this beneficent fluid they used with that sense of appreciation which only a pioneer can feel toward whiskey. It was hours before Catherine rewarded them with a gleam of consciousness. Her body had been frozen in many places. Her arms, outstretched over her children and holding the clothes down about them, were rigid. But consciousness came at length, dimly struggling up through her brain; and over her she saw her friends rubbing and rubbing those strong firm arms of hers with snow.

She half raised her head, with a horror of comprehension in her eyes, and listened. A cry answered her,—a cry of dull pain from the baby. Henderson dropped on his knees beside her.

"They are all safe," he said. "And we will never leave you again. I have been afraid to tell you how I love you. I thought I might offend you. I thought I ought to wait—you know why. But I will never let you run the risks of this awful life alone again. You must rename the baby. From this day his name is John. And we will have the three Johns again back at the old ranch. It doesn't matter whether you love me or not, Catherine, I am going to take care of you just the same. Gillispie agrees with me."

"Damme, yes," muttered Gillispie, feeling of his hip-pocket for consolation in his old manner.

Catherine struggled to find her voice, but it would not come.

"Do not speak," whispered John. "Tell me with your eyes whether you will come as my wife or only as our sister."

Catherine told him.

"This is Thanksgiving day," said he. "And we don't know much about praying, but I guess we all have something in our hearts that does just as well."

"Damme, yes," said Gillispie, again, as he pensively cocked and uncocked his revolver.



A Resuscitation

AFTER being dead twenty years, he walked out into the sunshine.

It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh.

To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body.

The penitentiary is one of these. David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten heart, he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself,—for hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and industry.

But they had vanished and left no trace, like the flesh of the dead men on the plains, and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.

You can understand, can you not, how a skeleton might wish to get back into its comfortable grave? David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him. Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth—that snug and insignificant planet—looked to David Culross.

"If I go back," he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills, "they will not take me in." He was absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams,-dreams which were never prophecies or promises, but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by his crime, and relinquished by his pride.

The men who passed him looked at him with mingled amusement and pity. They knew the "prison look," and they knew the prison clothes. For though the State gives to its discharged convicts clothes which are like those of other men, it makes a hundred suits from the same sort of cloth. The police know the fabric, and even the citizens recognize it. But, then, were each man dressed in different garb he could not be disguised. Every one knows in what dull school that sidelong glance is learned, that aimless drooping of the shoulders, that rhythmic lifting of the heavy foot.

David Culross wondered if his will were dead. He put it to the test. He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many miserable years. He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at nonchalance, and walked down the street with a step which was meant to be brisk, but which was in fact only uncertain. In his pocket were ten dollars. This much the State equips a man with when it sends him out of its penal halls. It gives him also transportation to any point within reasonable distance that he may desire to reach. Culross had requested a ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait, these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.

There was the office, bare and clean, where the young stoop-shouldered clerks sat writing. In their faces was a strange resemblance, just as there was in the backs of the ledgers, and in the endless bills on the spindles. If one of them laughed, it was not with gayety, but with gratification at the discomfiture of another. None of them ate well. None of them were rested after sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy one-horse cars to and from their work. Sundays they lay in bed very late, and ate more dinner than they could digest. There was a certain fellowship among them,—such fellowship as a band of captives among cannibals might feel, each of them waiting with vital curiosity to see who was the next to be eaten. But of that fellowship that plans in unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicariously, strengthens into friendship and communion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed, such camaraderie would have been disapproved of by the Head Clerk. He would have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he would on an error in the footing of the year's accounts. It was tacitly understood that one reached the proud position of Head Clerk by having no emotions whatever.

Culross did not remember having been born with a pen in his hand, or even with one behind his ear; but certainly from the day he had been let out of knickerbockers his constant companion had been that greatly overestimated article. His father dying at a time that cut short David's school-days, he went out armed with his new knowledge of double-entry, determined to make a fortune and a commercial name. Meantime, he lived in a suite of three rooms on West Madison Street with his mother, who was a good woman, and lived where she did that she might be near her favorite meeting-house. She prayed, and cooked bad dinners, principally composed of dispiriting pastry. Her idea of house-keeping was to keep the shades down, whatever happened; and when David left home in the evening for any purpose of pleasure, she wept. David persuaded himself that he despised amusement, and went to bed each night at half-past nine in a folding bedstead in the front room, and, by becoming absolutely stolid from mere vegetation, imagined that he was almost fit to be a Head Clerk.

Walking down the street now after the twenty years, thinking of these dead but innocent days, this was the picture he saw; and as he reflected upon it, even the despoiled and desolate years just passed seemed richer by contrast.

He reached the station thus dreaming, and found, as he had been told when the warden bade him good-by, that a train was to be at hand directly bound to the city. A few moments later he was on that train. Well back in the shadow, and out of sight of the other passengers, he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the comfortable cushion. He would willingly have looked from the window,—green fields were new and wonderful; drifting clouds a marvel; men, houses, horses, farms, all a revelation,—but those haunting visions were at him again, and would not leave brain or eye free for other things.

But the next scene had warmer tints. It was the interior of a rich room,—crimson and amber fabrics, flowers, the gleam of a statue beyond the drapings; the sound of a tender piano unflinging a familiar melody, and a woman. She was just a part of all the luxury.

He himself, very timid and conscious of his awkwardness, sat near, trying barrenly to get some of his thoughts out of his brain on to his tongue.

"Strange, isn't it," the woman broke in on her own music, "that we have seen each other so very often and never spoken? I've often thought introductions were ridiculous. Fancy seeing a person year in and year out, and really knowing all about him, and being perfectly acquainted with his name—at least his or her name, you know—and then never speaking! Some one comes along, and says, 'Miss Le Baron, this is Mr. Culross,' just as if one didn't know that all the time! And there you are! You cease to be dumb folks, and fall to talking, and say a lot of things neither of you care about, and after five or six weeks of time and sundry meetings, get down to honestly saying what you mean. I'm so glad we've got through with that first stage, and can say what we think and tell what we really like."

Then the playing began again,—a harplike intermingling of soft sounds. Zoe Le Baron's hands were very girlish. Everything about her was unformed. Even her mind was so. But all promised a full completion. The voice, the shoulders, the smile, the words, the lips, the arms, the whole mind and body, were rounding to maturity.

"Why do you never come to church in the morning?" asks Miss Le Baron, wheeling around on her piano-stool suddenly. "You are only there at night, with your mother."

"I go only on her account," replies David, truthfully. "In the morning I am so tired with the week's work that I rest at home. I ought to go, I know."

"Yes, you ought," returns the young woman, gravely. "It doesn't really rest one to lie in bed like that. I've tried it at boarding-school. It was no good whatever."

"Should you advise me," asks David, in a confiding tone, "to arise early on Sunday?"

The girl blushes a little. "By all means!" she cries, her eyes twinkling, "and—and come to church. Our morning sermons are really very much better than those in the evening." And she plays a waltz, and what with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses, a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling of sound. As the painter flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women suddenly realize that each life has its significance,-their own lives no less than the lives of others.

The man sitting there in the shadow in that noisy train saw in his vision how the lad arose and moved, like one under a spell, toward the piano. He felt again the enchantment of the music-ridden quiet, of the perfume, and the presence of the woman.

"Knowing you and speaking with you have not made much difference with me," he whispers, drunk on the new wine of passion, "for I have loved you since I saw you first. And though it is so sweet to hear you speak, your voice is no more beautiful than I thought it would be. I have loved you a long time, and I want to know—"

The broken man in the shadow remembered how the lad stopped, astonished at his boldness and his fluency, overcome suddenly at the thought of what he was saying. The music stopped with a discord. The girl arose, trembling and scarlet.

"I would not have believed it of you," she cries, "to take advantage of me like this, when I am alone—and—everything. You know very well that nothing but trouble could come to either of us from your telling me a thing like that."

He puts his hands up to his face to keep off her anger. He is trembling with confusion.

Then she broke in penitently, trying to pull his hands away from his hot face: "Never mind! I know you didn't mean anything. Be good, do, and don't spoil the lovely times we have together. You know very well father and mother wouldn't let us see each other at all if they—if they thought you were saying anything such as you said just now."

"Oh, but I can't help it!" cries the boy, despairingly. "I have never loved anybody at all till now. I don't mean not another girl, you know. But you are the first being I ever cared for. I sometimes think mother cares for me because I pay the rent. And the office—you can't imagine what that is like. The men in it are moving corpses. They're proud to be that way, and so was I till I knew you and learned what life was like. All the happy moments I have had have been here. Now, if you tell me that we are not to care for each other—"

There was some one coming down the hall. The curtain lifted. A middle-aged man stood there looking at him.

"Culross," said he, "I'm disappointed in you. I didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't help hearing what you said just now. I don't blame you particularly. Young men will be fools. And I do not in any way mean to insult you when I tell you to stop your coming here. I don't want to see you inside this door again, and after a while you will thank me for it. You have taken a very unfair advantage of my invitation. I make allowances for your youth."

He held back the curtain for the lad to pass out. David threw a miserable glance at the girl. She was standing looking at her father with an expression that David could not fathom. He went into the hall, picked up his hat, and walked out in silence.

David wondered that night, walking the chilly streets after he quitted the house, and often, often afterward, if that comfortable and prosperous gentleman, safe beyond the perturbations of youth, had any idea of what he had done. How COULD he know anything of the black monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The "desk's dead wood" and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till it maddens him.

The bowed man in the car-seat remembered with a flush of reminiscent misery how the lad turned suddenly in his walk and entered the door of a drinking-room that stood open. It was very comfortable within. The screens kept out the chill of the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled floor was clean, the tables placed near together, the bar glittering, the attendants white-aproned and brisk.

David liked the place, and he liked better still the laughter that came from a room within. It had a note in it a little different from anything he had ever heard before in his life, and one that echoed his mood. He ventured to ask if he might go into the farther room.

It does not mean much when most young men go to a place like this. They take their bit of unwholesome dissipation quietly enough, and are a little coarser and more careless each time they indulge in it, perhaps. But certainly their acts, whatever gradual deterioration they may indicate, bespeak no sudden moral revolution. With this young clerk it was different. He was a worse man from the moment he entered the door, for he did violence to his principles; he killed his self-respect.

He had been paid at the office that night, and he had the money—a week's miserable pittance—in his pocket. His every action revealed the fact that he was a novice in recklessness. His innocent face piqued the men within. They gave him a welcome that amazed him. Of course the rest of the evening was a chaos to him. The throat down which he poured the liquor was as tender as a child's. The men turned his head with their ironical compliments. Their boisterous good-fellowship was as intoxicating to this poor young recluse as the liquor.

It was the revulsion from this feeling, when he came to a consciousness that the men were laughing at him and not with him, that wrecked his life. He had gone from beer to whiskey, and from whiskey to brandy, by this time, at the suggestion of the men, and was making awkward lunges with a billiard cue, spurred on by the mocking applause of the others. One young fellow was particularly hilarious at his expense. His jokes became insults, or so they seemed to David.

A quarrel followed, half a jest on the part of the other, all serious as far as David was concerned. And then—Well, who could tell how it happened? The billiard cue was in David's hand, and the skull of the jester was split, a horrible gaping thing, revoltingly animal.

David never saw his home again. His mother gave it out in church that her heart was broken, and she wrote a letter to David begging him to reform. She said she would never cease to pray for him, that he might return to grace. He had an attorney, an impecunious and very aged gentleman, whose life was a venerable failure, and who talked so much about his personal inconveniences from indigestion that he forgot to take a very keen interest in the concerns of his client. David's trial made no sensation. He did not even have the cheap sympathy of the morbid. The court-room was almost empty the dull spring day when the east wind beat against the window, jangling the loose panes all through the reading of the verdict.

Twenty years!

Twenty years in the penitentiary!

David looked up at the judge and smiled. Men have been known to smile that way when the car-wheel crashes over their legs, or a bullet lets the air through their lungs.

All that followed would have seemed more terrible if it had not appeared to be so remote. David had to assure himself over and over that it was really he who was put in that disgraceful dress, and locked in that shameful walk from corridor to workroom, from work-room to chapel. The work was not much more monotonous than that to which he had been accustomed in the office. Here, as there, one was reproved for not doing the required amount, but never praised for extraordinary efforts. Here, as there, the workers regarded each other with dislike and suspicion. Here, as there, work was a penalty and not a pleasure.

It is the nights that are to be dreaded in a penitentiary. Speech eases the brain of free men; but the man condemned to eternal silence is bound to endure torments. Thought, which might be a diversion, becomes a curse; it is a painful disease which becomes chronic. It does not take long to forget the days of the week and the months of the year when time brings no variance. David drugged himself on dreams. He knew it was weakness, but it was the wine of forgetfulness, and he indulged in it. He went over and over, in endless repetition, every scene in which Zoe Le Baron had figured.

He learned by a paper that she had gone to Europe. He was glad of that. For there were hours in which he imagined that his fate might have caused her distress—not much, of course, but perhaps an occasional hour of sympathetic regret. But it was pleasanter not to think of that. He preferred to remember the hours they had spent together while she was teaching him the joy of life.

How lovely her gray eyes were! Deep, yet bright, and full of silent little speeches. The rooms in which he imagined her as moving were always splendid; the gowns she wore were of rustling silk. He never in any dream, waking or sleeping, associated her with poverty or sorrow or pain. Gay and beautiful, she moved from city to city, in these visions of David's, looking always at wonderful things, and finding laughter in every happening.

It was six months after his entrance into his silent abode that a letter came for him.

"By rights, Culross," said the warden, "I should not give this letter to you. It isn't the sort we approve of. But you're in for a good spell, and if there is anything that can make life seem more tolerable, I don't know but you're entitled to it. At least, I'm not the man to deny it to you."

This was the letter:—

"MY DEAR FRIEND,—I hope you do not think that all these months, when you have been suffering so terribly, I have been thinking of other things! But I am sure you know the truth. You know that I could not send you word or come to see you, or I would have done it. When I first heard of what you had done, I saw it all as it happened,—that dreadful scene, I mean, in the saloon. I am sure I have imagined everything just as it was. I begged papa to help you, but he was very angry. You see, papa was so peculiar. He thought more of the appearances of things, perhaps, than of facts. It infuriated him to think of me as being concerned about you or with you. I did not know he could be so angry, and his anger did not die, but for days it cast such a shadow over me that I used to wish I was dead. Only I would not disobey him, and now I am glad of that. We were in France three months, and then, coming home, papa died. It was on the voyage. I wish he had asked me to forgive him, for then I think I could have remembered him with more tenderness. But he did nothing of the kind. He did not seem to think he had done wrong in any way, though I feel that some way we might have saved you. I am back here in Chicago in the old home. But I shall not stay in this house. It is so large and lonesome, and I always see you and father facing each other angrily there in the parlor when I enter it. So I am going to get me some cosey rooms in another part of the city, and take my aunt, who is a sweet old lady, to live with me; and I am going to devote my time—all of it—and all of my brains to getting you out of that terrible place. What is the use of telling me that you are a murderer? Do I not know you could not be brought to hurt anything? I suppose you must have killed that poor man, but then it was not you, it was that dreadful drink—it was Me! That is what continually haunts me. If I had been a braver girl, and spoken the words that were in my heart, you would not have gone into that place. You would be innocent to-day. It was I who was responsible for it all. I let father kill your heart right there before me, and never said a word. Yet I knew how it was with you, and—this is what I ought to have said then, and what I must say now—and all the time I felt just as you did. I thought I should die when I saw you go away, and knew you would never come back again. Only I was so selfish, I was so wicked, I would say nothing.

"I have no right to be comfortable and hopeful, and to have friends, with you shut up from liberty and happiness. I will not have those comfortable rooms, after all. I will live as you do. I will live alone in a bare room. For it is I who am guilty! And then I will feel that I also am being punished.

"Do you hate me? Perhaps my telling you now all these things, and that I felt toward you just as you did toward me, will not make you happy. For it may be that you despise me.

"Anyway, I have told you the truth now. I will go as soon as I hear from you to a lawyer, and try to find out how you may be liberated. I am sure it can be done when the facts are known.

"Poor boy! How I do hope you have known in your heart that I was not forgetting you. Indeed, day or night, I have thought of nothing else. Now I am free to help you. And be sure, whatever happens, that I am working for you.

"ZOE LE BARON."

That was all. Just a girlish, constrained letter, hardly hinting at the hot tears that had been shed for many weary nights, coyly telling of the impatient young love and all the maidenly shame.

David permitted himself to read it only once. Then a sudden resolution was born-a heroic one. Before he got the letter he was a crushed and unsophisticated boy; when he had read it, and absorbed its full significance, he became suddenly a man, capable of a great sacrifice.

"I return your letter," he wrote, without superscription, "and thank you for your anxiety about me. But the truth is, I had forgotten all about you in my trouble. You were not in the least to blame for what happened. I might have known I would come to such an end. You thought I was good, of course; but it is not easy to find out the life of a young man. It is rather mortifying to have a private letter sent here, because the warden reads them all. I hope you will enjoy yourself this winter, and hasten to forget one who had certainly forgotten you till reminded by your letter, which I return.

"Respectfully,

"DAVID CULROSS."

That night some deep lines came into his face which never left it, and which made him look like a man of middle age.

He never doubted that his plan would succeed; that, piqued and indignant at his ingratitude, she would hate him, and in a little time forget he ever lived, or remember him only to blush with shame at her past association with him. He saw her happy, loved, living the usual life of women, with all those things that make life rich.

For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him. He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.

A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would be sure to hate a man who had mortified her.

So he fell to dreaming of her again as moving among happy and luxurious scenes, exquisitely clothed, with flowers on her bosom and jewels on her neck; and he saw men loving her, and was glad, and saw her at last loving the best of them, and told himself in the silence of the night that it was as he wished.

Yet always, always, from weary week to weary week, he rehearsed the scenes. They were his theatre, his opera, his library, his lecture hall.

He rehearsed them again there on the cars. He never wearied of them. To be sure, other thoughts had come to him at night. Much that to most men seems complex and puzzling had grown to appear simple to him. In a way his brain had quickened and deepened through the years of solitude. He had thought out a great many things. He had read a few good books and digested them, and the visions in his heart had kept him from being bitter.

Yet, suddenly confronted with liberty, turned loose like a pastured colt, without master or rein, he felt only confusion and dismay. He might be expected to feel exultation. He experienced only fright. It is precisely the same with the liberated colt.

The train pulled into a bustling station, in which the multitudinous noises were thrown back again from the arched iron roof. The relentless haste of all the people was inexpressibly cruel to the man who looked from the window wondering whither he would go, and if, among all the thousands that made up that vast and throbbing city, he would ever find a friend.

For a moment David longed even for that unmaternal mother who had forgotten him in the hour of his distress; but she had been dead for many years.

The train stopped. Every one got out. David forced himself to his feet and followed. He had been driven back into the world. It would have seemed less terrible to have been driven into a desert. He walked toward the great iron gates, seeing the people and hearing the noises confusedly.

As he entered the space beyond the grating some one caught him by the arm. It was a little middle-aged woman in plain clothes, and with sad gray eyes.

"Is this David?" said she.

He did not speak, but his face answered her.

"I knew you were coming to-day. I've waited all these years, David. You didn't think I believed what you said in that letter did you? This way, David,—this is the way home."



Two Pioneers

IT was the year of the small-pox. The Pawnees had died in their cold tepees by the fifties, the soldiers lay dead in the trenches without the fort, and many a gay French voyageur, who had thought to go singing down the Missouri on his fur-laden raft in the springtime, would never again see the lights of St. Louis, or the coin of the mighty Choteau company.

It had been a winter of tragedies. The rigors of the weather and the scourge of the disease had been fought with Indian charm and with Catholic prayer. Both were equally unavailing. If a man was taken sick at the fort they put him in a warm room, brought him a jug of water once a day, and left him to find out what his constitution was worth. Generally he recovered; for the surgeon's supplies had been exhausted early in the year. But the Indians, in their torment, rushed into the river through the ice, and returned to roll themselves in their blankets and die in ungroaning stoicism.

Every one had grown bitter and hard. The knives of the trappers were sharp, and not one whit sharper than their tempers. Some one said that the friendly Pawnees were conspiring with the Sioux, who were always treacherous, to sack the settlement. The trappers doubted this. They and the Pawnees had been friends many years, and they had together killed the Sioux in four famous battles on the Platte. Yet—who knows? There was pestilence in the air, and it had somehow got into men's souls as well as their bodies.

So, at least, Father de Smet said. He alone did not despair. He alone tried neither charm nor curse. He dressed him an altar in the wilderness, and he prayed at it—but not for impossible things. When in a day's journey you come across two lodges of Indians, sixty souls in each, lying dead and distorted from the plague in their desolate tepees, you do not pray, if you are a man like Father de Smet. You go on to the next lodge where the living yet are, and teach them how to avoid death.

Besides, when you are young, it is much easier to act than to pray. When the children cried for food, Father de Smet took down the rifle from the wall and went out with it, coming back only when he could feed the hungry. There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows of the Papillion. When they—the children—were cold, this young man brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees. If he wanted to cross a river and had no boat at hand, he leaped the uncertain ice, or, in clear current, swam, with his clothes on his head in a bundle.

A wonderful traveller for the time was Father de Smet. Twice he had gone as far as the land of the Flathead nation, and he could climb mountain passes as well as any guide of the Rockies. He had built a dozen missions, lying all the way from the Columbia to the Kaw. He had always a jest at his tongue's end, and served it out with as much readiness as a prayer; and he had, withal, an arm trained to do execution. Every man on the plains understood the art of self-preservation. Even in Cainsville, over by the council ground of the western tribes, which was quite the most civilized place for hundreds of miles, life was uncertain when the boats came from St. Louis with bad whiskey in their holds. But no one dared take liberties with the holy father. The thrust from his shoulder was straight and sure, and his fist was hard.

Yet it was not the sinner that Father de Smet meant to crush. He always supplemented his acts of physical prowess with that explanation. It was the sin that he struck at from the shoulder—and may not even an anointed one strike at sin?

Father de Smet could draw a fine line, too, between the things which were bad in themselves, and the things which were only extrinsically bad. For example, there were the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon. Mam'selle herself was not above reproach, but her soups were. Mademoiselle Ninon was the only Parisian thing in the settlement. And she was certainly to be avoided—which was perhaps the reason that no one avoided her. It was four years since she had seen Paris. She was sixteen then, and she followed the fortunes of a certain adventurer who found it advisable to sail for Montreal. Ninon had been bored back in Paris, it being dull in the mantua-making shop of Madame Guittar. If she had been a man she would have taken to navigation, and might have made herself famous by sailing to some unknown part of the New World. Being a woman, she took a lover who was going to New France, and forgot to weep when he found an early and violent death. And there were others at hand, and Ninon sailed around the cold blue lakes, past Sault St. Marie, and made her way across the portages to the Mississippi, and so down to the sacred rock of St. Louis. That was a merry place. Ninon had fault to find neither with the wine nor the dances. They were all that one could have desired, and there was no limit to either of them. But still, after a time, even this grew tiresome to one of Ninon's spirit, and she took the first opportunity to sail up the Missouri with a certain young trapper connected with the great fur company, and so found herself at Cainsville, with the blue bluffs rising to the east of her, and the low white stretches of the river flats undulating down to where the sluggish stream wound its way southward capriciously.

Ninon soon tired of her trapper. For one thing she found out that he was a coward. She saw him run once in a buffalo fight. That was when the Pawnee stood still with a blanket stretched wide in a gaudy square, and caught the head of the mad animal fairly in the tough fabric; his mustang's legs trembled under him, but he did not move,—for a mustang is the soul of an Indian, and obeys each thought; the Indian himself felt his heart pounding at his ribs; but once with that garment fast over the baffled eyes of the struggling brute, the rest was only a matter of judicious knife-thrusts. Ninon saw this. She rode past her lover, and snatched the twisted bullion cord from his hat that she had braided and put there, and that night she tied it on the hat of the Pawnee who had killed the buffalo.

The Pawnees were rather proud of the episode, and as for the Frenchmen, they did not mind. The French have always been very adaptable in America. Ninon was universally popular.

And so were her soups.

Every man has his price. Father de Smet's was the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon. Fancy! If you have an educated palate and are obliged to eat the strong distillation of buffalo meat, cooked in a pot which has been wiped out with the greasy petticoat of a squaw! When Ninon came down from St. Louis she brought with her a great box containing neither clothes, furniture, nor trinkets, but something much more wonderful! It was a marvellous compounding of spices and seasonings. The aromatic liquids she set before the enchanted men of the settlement bore no more relation to ordinary buffalo soup than Chateaubrand's Indian maidens did to one of the Pawnee girls, who slouched about the settlement with noxious tresses and sullen slavish coquetries.

Father de Smet would not at any time have called Ninon a scarlet woman. But when he ate the dish of soup or tasted the hot corn-cakes that she invariably invited him to partake of as he passed her little house, he refrained with all the charity of a true Christian and an accomplished epicure from even thinking her such. And he remembered the words of the Saviour, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."

To Father de Smet's healthy nature nothing seemed more superfluous than sin. And he was averse to thinking that any committed deeds of which he need be ashamed. So it was his habit, especially if the day was pleasant and his own thoughts happy, to say to himself when he saw one of the wild young trappers leaving the cabin of Mademoiselle Ninon: "He has been for some of the good woman's hot cakes," till he grew quite to believe that the only attractions that the adroit Frenchwoman possessed were of a gastronomic nature.

To tell the truth, the attractions of Mademoiselle Ninon were varied. To begin with, she was the only thing in that wilderness to suggest home. Ninon had a genius for home-making. Her cabin, in which she cooked, slept, ate, lived, had become a boudoir.

The walls were hung with rare and beautiful skins; the very floor made rich with huge bear robes, their permeating odors subdued by heavy perfumes brought, like the spices, from St. Louis. The bed, in daytime, was a couch of beaver-skins; the fireplace had branching antlers above it, on which were hung some of the evidences of the fair Ninon's coquetry, such as silken scarves, of the sort the voyageurs from the far north wore; and necklaces made by the Indians of the Pacific coast and brought to Ninon by—but it is not polite to inquire into these matters. There were little moccasins also, much decorated with porcupine-quills, one pair of which Father de Smet had brought from the Flathead nation, and presented to Ninon that time when she nursed him through a frightful run of fever. She would take no money for her patient services.

"Father," said she, gravely, when he offered it to her, "I am not myself virtuous. But I have the distinction of having preserved the only virtuous creature in the settlement for further usefulness. Sometimes, perhaps, you will pray for Ninon."

Father de Smet never forgot those prayers.

These were wild times, mind you. No use to keep your skirts coldly clean if you wished to be of help. These men were subduing a continent. Their primitive qualities came out. Courage, endurance, sacrifice, suffering without complaint, friendship to the death, indomitable hatred, unfaltering hope, deep-seated greed, splendid gayety—it takes these things to subdue a continent. Vice is also an incidental,—that is to say, what one calls vice. This is because it is the custom to measure these men as if they were governed by the laws of civilization, where there is neither law nor civilization.

This much is certain: gentlemen cannot conquer a country. They tried gentlemen back in Virginia, and they died, partly from lack of intellect, but mostly from lack of energy. After the yeomen have fought the conquering fight, it is well enough to bring in gentlemen, who are sometimes clever lawmakers, and who look well on thrones or in presidential chairs.

But to return to the winter of the smallpox. It was then that the priest and Ninon grew to know each other well. They became acquainted first in the cabin where four of the trappers lay tossing in delirium. The horrible smell of disease weighted the air. Outside wet snow fell continuously and the clouds seemed to rest only a few feet above the sullen bluffs. The room was bare of comforts, and very dirty. Ninon looked about with disgust.

"You pray," said she to the priest, "and I will clean the room."

"Not so," returned the broad-shouldered father, smilingly, "we will both clean the room." Thus it came that they scrubbed the floor together, and made the chimney so that it would not smoke, and washed the blankets on the beds, and kept the woodpile high. They also devised ventilators, and let in fresh air without exposing the patients. They had no medicine, but they continually rubbed the suffering men with bear's grease.

"It's better than medicine," said Ninon, after the tenth day, as, wan with watching, she held the cool hand of one of the recovering men in her own. "If we had had medicines we should have killed these men."

"You are a woman of remarkable sense," said the holy father, who was eating a dish of corn-meal and milk that Ninon had just prepared, "and a woman also of Christian courage."

"Christian courage?" echoed Ninon; "do you think that is what you call it? I am not afraid, no, not I; but it is not Christian courage. You mistake in calling it that." There were tears in her eyes. The priest saw them.

"God lead you at last into peaceful ways," said he, softly, lifting one hand in blessing. "Your vigil is ended. Go to your home and sleep. You know the value of the temporal life that God has given to man. In the hours of the night, Ninon, think of the value of eternal life, which it is also His to give."

Ninon stared at him a moment with a dawning horror in her eyes.

Then she pointed to the table.

"Whatever you do," said she, "don't forget the bear's grease." And she went out laughing. The priest did not pause to recommend her soul to further blessing. He obeyed her directions.

March was wearing away tediously. The river was not yet open, and the belated boats with needed supplies were moored far down the river. Many of the reduced settlers were dependent on the meat the Indians brought them for sustenance. The mud made the roads almost impassable; for the frost lay in a solid bed six inches below the surface, and all above that was semiliquid muck. Snow and rain alternated, and the frightful disease did not cease its ravages.

The priest got little sleep. Now he was at the bed of a little half-breed child, smoothing the straight black locks from the narrow brow; now at the cot of some hulking trapper, who wept at the pain, but died finally with a grin of bravado on his lips; now in a foul tepee, where some grave Pawnee wrapped his mantle about him, and gazed with prophetic and unflinching eyes into the land of the hereafter.

The little school that the priest started had been long since abandoned. It was only the preservation of life that one thought of in these days. And recklessness had made the men desperate. To the ravages of disease were added horrible murders. Moral health is always low when physical health is so.

Give a nation two winters of grippe, and it will have an epidemic of suicide. Give it starvation and small-pox, and it will have a contagion of murders. There are subtle laws underlying these things,—laws which the physicians think they can explain; but they are mistaken. The reason is not so material as it seems.

But spring was near in spite of falling snow and the dirty ice in the river. There was not even a flushing of the willow twigs to tell it by, nor a clearing of the leaden sky,—only the almanac. Yet all men were looking forward to it The trappers put in the feeble days of convalescence, making long rafts on which to pile the skins dried over winter,—a fine variety, worth all but their weight in gold. Money was easily got in those days; but there are circumstances under which money is valueless.

Father de Smet thought of this the day before Easter, as he plunged through the mud of the winding street in his bearskin gaiters. Stout were his legs, firm his lungs, as he turned to breathe in the west wind; clear his sharp and humorous eyes. He was going to the little chapel where the mission school had previously been held. Here was a rude pulpit, and back of it a much-disfigured virgin, dressed in turkey-red calico. Two cheap candles in their tin sticks guarded this figure, and beneath, on the floor, was spread an otter-skin of perfect beauty. The seats were of pine, without backs, and the wind whistled through the chinks between the logs. Moreover, the place was dirty. Lenten service had been out of the question. The living had neither time nor strength to come to worship; and the dead were not given the honor of a burial from church in these times of terror. The priest looked about him in dismay, the place was so utterly forsaken; yet to let Easter go by without recognition was not to his liking. He had been the night before to every house in the settlement, bidding the people to come to devotions on Sunday morning. He knew that not one of them would refuse his invitation. There was no hero larger in the eyes of these unfortunates than the simple priest who walked among them with his unpretentious piety. The promises were given with whispered blessings, and there were voices that broke in making them, and hands that shook with honest gratitude. The priest, remembering these things, and all the awful suffering of the winter, determined to make the service symbolic, indeed, of the resurrection and the life,—the annual resurrection and life that comes each year, a palpable miracle, to teach the dullest that God reigns.

"How are you going to trim the altar?" cried a voice behind him.

He turned, startled, and in the doorway stood Mademoiselle Ninon, her short skirt belted with a red silk scarf,—the token of some trapper,—her ankles protected with fringed leggins, her head covered with a beribboned hat of felt, such as the voyageurs wore.

"Our devotions will be the only decorations we can hang on it. But gratitude is better than blossoms, and humanity more beautiful than green wreaths," said the father, gently.

It was a curious thing, and one that he had often noticed himself; he gave this woman—unworthy as she was—the best of his simple thoughts.

Ninon tiptoed toward the priest with one finger coquettishly raised to insure secrecy.

"You will never believe it," she whispered, "no one would believe it! But the fact is, father, I have two lilies."

"Lilies," cried the priest, incredulously, "two lilies?"

"That's what I say, father—two marvellously fair lilies with little sceptres of gold in them, and leaves as white as snow. The bulbs were brought me last autumn by—; that is to say, they were brought from St. Louis. Only now have they blossomed. Heavens, how I have watched the buds! I have said to myself every morning for a fortnight: 'Will they open in time for the good father's Easter morning service?' Then I said: 'They will open too soon. Buds,' I have cried to them, 'do not dare to open yet, or you will be horribly passee by Easter. Have the kindness, will you, to save yourselves for a great event.' And they did it; yes, father, you may not believe, but no later than this morning these sensible flowers opened up their leaves boldly, quite conscious that they were doing the right thing, and to-morrow, if you please, they will be here. And they will perfume the whole place; yes."

She stopped suddenly, and relaxed her vivacious expression for one of pain.

"You are certainly ill," cried the priest. "Rest yourself." He tried to push her on to one of the seats; but a sort of convulsive rigidity came over her, very alarming to look at.

"You are worn out," her companion said gravely. "And you are chilled."

"Yes, I'm cold," confessed Ninon. "But I had to come to tell you about the lilies. But, do you see, I never could bring myself to put them in this room as it is now. It would be too absurd to place them among this dirt. We must clean the place."

"The place will be cleaned. I will see to it. But as for you, go home and care for yourself." Ninon started toward the door with an uncertain step. Suddenly she came back.

"It is too funny," she said, "that red calico there on the Virgin. Father, I have some laces which were my mother's, who was a good woman, and which have never been worn by me. They are all I have to remember France by and the days when I was—different. If I might be permitted—" she hesitated and looked timidly at the priest.

"'She hath done what she could,'" murmured Father de Smet, softly. "Bring your laces, Ninon." He would have added: "Thy sins be forgiven thee." But unfortunately, at this moment, Pierre came lounging down the street, through the mud, fresh from Fort Laramie. His rifle was slung across his back, and a full game-bag revealed the fact that he had amused himself on his way. His curly and wind-bleached hair blew out in time-torn banners from the edge of his wide hat. His piercing, black eyes were those of a man who drinks deep, fights hard, and lives always in the open air. Wild animals have such eyes, only there is this difference: the viciousness of an animal is natural; at least one-half of the viciousness of man is artificial and devised.

When Ninon saw the frost-reddened face of this gallant of the plains, she gave a little cry of delight, and the color rushed back into her face. The trapper saw her, and gave a rude shout of welcome. The next moment, he had swung her clear of the chapel steps; and then the two went down the street together, Pierre pausing only long enough to doff his hat to the priest.

"The Virgin will wear no fresh laces," said the priest, with some bitterness; but he was mistaken. An hour later, Ninon was back, not only with a box of laces, but also with a collection of cosmetics, with which she proceeded to make startling the scratched and faded face of the wooden Virgin, who wore, after the completion of Ninon's labors, a decidedly piquant and saucy expression. The very manner in which the laces were draped had a suggestion of Ninon's still unforgotten art as a maker of millinery, and was really a very good presentment of Paris fashions four years past. Pierre, meantime, amused himself by filling up the chinks in the logs with fresh mud,—a commodity of which there was no lack,—and others of the neighbors, incited by these extraordinary efforts, washed the dirt from seats, floor, and windows, and brought furs with which to make presentable the floor about the pulpit.

Father de Smet worked harder than any of them. In his happy enthusiasm he chose to think this energy on the part of the others was prompted by piety, though well he knew it was only a refuge from the insufferable ennui that pervaded the place. Ninon suddenly came up to him with a white face.

"I am not well," she said. Her teeth were chattering, and her eyes had a little blue glaze over them. "I am going home. In the morning I will send the lilies."

The priest caught her by the hand.

"Ninon," he whispered, "it is on my soul not to let you go to-night. Something tells me that the hour of your salvation is come. Women worse than you, Ninon, have come to lead holy lives. Pray, Ninon, pray to the Mother of Sorrows, who knows the sufferings and sins of the heart." He pointed to the befrilled and highly fashionable Virgin with her rouge-stained cheeks.

Ninon shrank from him, and the same convulsive rigidity he had noticed before, held her immovable. A moment later, she was on the street again, and the priest, watching her down the street, saw her enter her cabin with Pierre.

.......

It was past midnight when the priest was awakened from his sleep by a knock on the door. He wrapped his great buffalo-coat about him, and answered the summons. Without in the damp darkness stood Pierre.

"Father," he cried, "Ninon has sent for you. Since she left you, she has been very ill. I have done what I could; but now she hardly speaks, but I make out that she wants you." Ten minutes later, they were in Ninon's cabin. When Father de Smet looked at her he knew she was dying. He had seen the Indians like that many times during the winter. It was the plague, but driven in to prey upon the system by the exposure. The Parisienne's teeth were set, but she managed to smile upon her visitor as he threw off his coat and bent over her. He poured some whiskey for her; but she could not get the liquid over her throat.

"Do not," she said fiercely between those set white teeth, "do not forget the lilies." She sank back and fixed her glazing eyes on the antlers, and kept them there watching those dangling silken scarves, while the priest, in haste, spoke the words for the departing soul.

The next morning she lay dead among those half barbaric relics of her coquetry, and two white lilies with hearts of gold shed perfume from an altar in a wilderness.



Up the Gulch

"GO West?" sighed Kate. "Why, yes! I'd like to go West."

She looked at the babies, who were playing on the floor with their father, and sighed again.

"You've got to go somewhere, you know, Kate. It might as well be west as in any other direction. And this is such a chance! We can't have mamma lying around on sofas without any roses in her cheeks, can we?" He put this last to the children, who, being yet at the age when they talked in "Early English," as their father called it, made a clamorous but inarticulate reply.

Major Shelly, the grandfather of these very young persons, stroked his mustache and looked indulgent.

"Show almost human intelligence, don't they?" said their father, as he lay flat on his back and permitted the babies to climb over him.

"Ya-as," drawled the major. "They do. Don't see how you account for it, Jack."

Jack roared, and the lips of the babies trembled with fear.

Their mother said nothing. She was on the sofa, her hands lying inert, her eyes fixed on her rosy babies with an expression which her father-in-law and her husband tried hard not to notice.

It was not easy to tell why Kate was ailing. Of course, the babies were young, but there were other reasons.

"I believe you're too happy," Jack sometimes said to her. "Try not to be quite so happy, Kate. At least, try not to take your happiness so seriously. Please don't adore me so; I'm only a commonplace fellow. And the babies—they're not going to blow away."

But Kate continued to look with intense eyes at her little world, and to draw into it with loving and generous hands all who were willing to come.

"Kate is just like a kite," Jack explained to his father, the major; "she can't keep afloat without just so many bobs."

Kate's "bobs" were the unfortunates she collected around her. These absorbed her strength. She felt their misery with sympathies that were abnormal. The very laborer in the streets felt his toil less keenly than she, as she watched the drops gather on his brow.

"Is life worth keeping at the cost of a lot like that?" she would ask. She felt ashamed of her own ease. She apologized for her own serene and perfect happiness. She even felt sorry for those mothers who had not children as radiantly beautiful as her own.

"Kate must have a change," the major had given out. He was going West on business and insisted on taking her with him. Jack looked doubtful. He wasn't sure how he would get along without Kate to look after everything. Secretly, he had an idea that servants were a kind of wild animal that had to be fed by an experienced keeper. But when the time came, he kissed her good-by in as jocular a manner as he could summon, and refused to see the tears that gathered in her eyes.

Until Chicago was reached, there was nothing very different from that which Kate had been in the habit of seeing. After that, she set herself to watch for Western characteristics. She felt that she would know them as soon as she saw them.

"I expected to be stirred up and shocked," she explained to the major. But somehow, the Western type did not appear. Commonplace women with worn faces—browned and seamed, though not aged—were at the stations, waiting for something or some one. Men with a hurried, nervous air were everywhere. Kate looked in vain for the gayety and heartiness which she had always associated with the West.

After they got beyond the timber country and rode hour after hour on a tract smooth as a becalmed ocean, she gave herself up to the feeling of immeasurable vastness which took possession of her. The sun rolled out of the sky into oblivion with a frantic, headlong haste. Nothing softened the aspect of its wrath. Near, red, familiar, it seemed to visibly bowl along the heavens. In the morning it rose as baldly as it had set. And back and forth over the awful plain blew the winds,—blew from east to west and back again, strong as if fresh from the chambers of their birth, full of elemental scents and of mighty murmurings.

"This is the West!" Kate cried, again and again.

The major listened to her unsmilingly. It always seemed to him a waste of muscular energy to smile. He did not talk much. Conversation had never appealed to him in the light of an art. He spoke when there was a direction or a command to be given, or an inquiry to be made. The major, if the truth must be known, was material. Things that he could taste, touch, see, appealed to him. He had been a volunteer in the civil war,—a volunteer with a good record,—which he never mentioned; and, having acquitted himself decently, let the matter go without asking reprisal or payment for what he had freely given. He went into business and sold cereal foods.

"I believe in useful things," the major expressed himself. "Oatmeal, wheat,-men have to have them. God intended they should. There's Jack—my son-Jack Shelly—lawyer. What's the use of litigation? God didn't design litigation. It doesn't do anybody any good. It isn't justice you get. It's something entirely different,—a verdict according to law. They say Jack's clever. But I'm mighty glad I sell wheat."

He didn't sell it as a speculator, however. That wasn't his way.

"I earn what I make," he often said; and he had grown rich in the selling of his wholesome foods.

. . . . . . .

Helena lies among round, brown hills. Above it is a sky of deep and illimitable blue. In the streets are crumbs of gold, but it no longer pays to mine for these; because, as real estate, the property is more valuable. It is a place of fictitious values. There is excitement in the air. Men have the faces of speculators. Every laborer is patient at his task because he cherishes a hope that some day he will be a millionnaire. There is hospitality, and cordiality and good fellowship, and an undeniable democracy. There is wealth and luxurious living. There is even culture,—but it is obtruded as a sort of novelty; it is not accepted as a matter of course.

Kate and the major were driven over two or three miles of dusty, hard road to a distant hotel, which stands in the midst of greenness,—in an oasis. Immediately above the green sward that surrounds it the brown hills rise, the grass scorched by the sun.

Kate yielded herself to the almost absurd luxury of the place with ease and complacency. She took kindly to the great verandas. She adapted herself to the elaborate and ill-assorted meals. She bathed in the marvellous pool, warm with the heat of eternal fires in mid-earth. This pool was covered with a picturesque Moorish structure, and at one end a cascade tumbled, over which the sun, coming through colored windows, made a mimic prism in the white spray. The life was not unendurable. The major was seldom with her, being obliged to go about his business; and Kate amused herself by driving over the hills, by watching the inhabitants, by wondering about the lives in the great, pretentious, unhomelike houses with their treeless yards and their closed shutters. The sunlight, white as the glare on Arabian sands, penetrated everywhere. It seemed to fairly scorch the eye-balls.

"Oh, we're West, now," Kate said, exultantly. "I've seen a thousand types. But yet—not quite THE type—not the impersonation of simplicity and daring that I was looking for."

The major didn't know quite what she was talking about. But he acquiesced. All he cared about was to see her grow stronger; and that she was doing every day. She was growing amazingly lovely, too,-at least the major thought so. Every one looked at her; but that was, perhaps, because she was such a sylph of a woman. Beside the stalwart major, she looked like a fairy princess.

One day she suddenly realized the fact that she had had a companion on the veranda for several mornings. Of course, there were a great many persons—invalids, largely—sitting about, but one of them had been obtruding himself persistently into her consciousness. It was not that he was rude; it was only that he was thinking about her. A person with a temperament like Kate's could not long be oblivious to a thing like that; and she furtively observed the offender with that genius for psychological perception which was at once her greatest danger and her charm.

The man was dressed with a childish attempt at display. His shirt-front was decorated with a diamond, and his cuff-buttons were of onyx with diamond settings. His clothes were expensive and perceptibly new, and he often changed his costumes, but with a noticeable disregard for propriety. He was very conscious of his silk hat, and frequently wiped it with a handkerchief on which his monogram was worked in blue.

When the 'busses brought up their loads, he was always on hand to watch the newcomers. He took a long time at his dinners, and appeared to order a great deal and eat very little. There were card-rooms and a billiard-hall, not to mention a bowling-alley and a tennis-court, where the other guests of the hotel spent much time. But this man never visited them. He sat often with one of the late reviews in his hand, looking as if he intended giving his attention to it at any moment. But after he had scrupulously cut the leaves with a little carved ivory paper-cutter, he sat staring straight before him with the book open, but unread, in his hand.

Kate took more interest in this melancholy, middle-aged man than she would have done if she had not been on the outlook for her Western type,—the man who was to combine all the qualities of chivalry, daring, bombast, and generosity, seasoned with piquant grammar, which she firmly believed to be the real thing. But notwithstanding this kindly and somewhat curious interest, she might never have made his acquaintance if it had not been for a rather unpleasant adventure.

The major was "closing up a deal" and had hurried away after breakfast, and Kate, in the luxury of convalescence, half-reclined in a great chair on the veranda and watched the dusky blue mist twining itself around the brown hills. She was not thinking of the babies; she was not worrying about home; she was not longing for anything, or even indulging in a dream. That vacuous content which engrosses the body after long indisposition, held her imperatively. Suddenly she was aroused from this happy condition of nothingness by the spectacle of an enormous bull-dog approaching her with threatening teeth. She had noticed the monster often in his kennel near the stables, and it was well understood that he was never to be permitted his freedom. Now he walked toward her with a solid step and an alarming deliberateness. Kate sat still and tried to assure herself that he meant no mischief, but by the time the great body had made itself felt on the skirt of her gown she could restrain her fear no longer, and gave a nervous cry of alarm. The brute answered with a growl. If he had lacked provocation before, he considered that he had it now. He showed his teeth and flung his detestable body upon her; and Kate felt herself growing dizzy with fear. But just then an arm was interposed and the dog was flung back. There was a momentary struggle. Some gentlemen came hurrying out of the office; and as they beat the dog back to its retreat, Kate summoned words from her parched throat to thank her benefactor.

It was the melancholy man with the new clothes. This morning he was dressed in a suit of the lightest gray, with a white marseilles waistcoat, over which his glittering chain shone ostentatiously. White tennis-shoes, a white rose in his buttonhole, and a white straw hat in his hand completed a toilet over which much time had evidently been spent. Kate noted these details as she held out her hand.

"I may have been alarmed without cause," she said; "but I was horribly frightened. Thank you so much for coming to my rescue. And I think, if you would add to your kindness by getting me a glass of water—"

When he came back, his hand was trembling a little; and as Kate looked up to learn the cause, she saw that his face was flushed. He was embarrassed. She decided that he was not accustomed to the society of ladies. "Brutes like that dog ain't no place in th' world—that's my opinion. There are some bad things we can't help havin' aroun'; but a bull-dog ain't one of 'em."

"I quite agree with you," Kate acquiesced, as she drank the water. "But as this is the first unpleasant experience of any kind that I have had since I came here, I don't feel that I have any right to complain."

"You're here fur yur health?"

"Yes. And I am getting it. You're not an invalid, I imagine?"

"No—no-op. I'm here be—well, I've thought fur a long time I'd like t' stay at this here hotel."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. I've been up th' gulch these fifteen years. Bin livin' on a shelf of black rock. Th' sun got 'round 'bout ten. Couldn't make a thing grow." The man was looking off toward the hills, with an expression of deep sadness in his eyes. "Didn't never live in a place where nothin' 'd grow, did you? I took geraniums up thar time an' time agin. Red ones. Made me think of mother; she's in Germany. Watered 'em mornin' an' night. Th' damned things died."

The oath slipped out with an artless unconsciousness, and there was a little moisture in his eyes. Kate felt she ought to bring the conversation to a close. She wondered what Jack would say if he saw her talking with a perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A great seal-ring bore an elaborate monogram, while the little finger displayed a collection of diamonds and emeralds truly dazzling to behold. An impulse of humanity and a sort of artistic curiosity, much stronger than her discretion, urged Kate to continue her conversation.

"What were you doing up the gulch?" she said.

The man leaned back in his chair and regarded her a moment before answering. He realized the significance of her question. He took it as a sign that she was willing to be friendly. A look of gratitude, almost tender, sprang into his eyes,—dull gray eyes, they were, with a kindliness for their only recommendation.

"Makin' my pile," he replied. "I've been in these parts twenty years. When I come here, I thought I was goin' to make a fortune right off. I had all th' money that mother could give me, and I lost everything I had in three months. I went up th' gulch." He paused, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

There was something in his remark and the intonation which made Kate say softly:

"I suppose you've had a hard time of it."

"Thar you were!" he cried. "Thar was th' rock—risin', risin', black! At th' bottom wus th' creek, howlin' day an' night! Lonesome! Gee! No one t' talk to. Of course, th' men. Had some with me always. They didn't talk. It's too-too quiet t' talk much. They played cards. Curious, but I never played cards. Don't think I'd find it amusin'. No, I worked. Came down here once in six months or three months. Had t' come—grub-staked th' men, you know. Did you ever eat salt pork?" He turned to Kate suddenly with this question.

"Why, yes; a few times. Did you have it?"

"Nothin' else, much. I used t' think of th' things mother cooked. Mother understood cookin', if ever a woman did. I'll never forget th' dinner she gave me th' day I came away. A woman ought t' cook. I hear American women don't go in much for cookin'."

"Oh, I think that's a mistake," Kate hastened to interrupt. "All that I know understand how to serve excellent dinners. Of course, they may not cook them themselves, but I think they could if it were necessary."

"Hum!" He picked up a long glove that had fallen from Kate's lap and fingered it before returning it.

"I s'pose you cook?"

"I make a specialty of salads and sorbets," smiled Kate. "I guess I could roast meat and make bread; but circumstances have not yet compelled me to do it. But I've a theory that an American woman can do anything she puts her mind to."