wled Bill; "and this"--waving at the
young man disparagingly--"SAYS he is Wilfred Compton. Know each other!"

"I'm glad to know you," Lahoma declared frankly. "It's mighty lucky
you came this way, for, you see, I just live here in the cove and never
touch the big world. I believe you know a thousand things about the
world that we ain't never dreamed of--"

"That we have never dreamed of," corrected Bill Atkins.

"--That we have never dreamed of," resumed Lahoma meekly; "and that's
what I would like to hear about. I expect to go out in the big world
and be a part of it, when I am older, when I know how to protect
myself, Brick says. I'm just a little girl now, if I do look so big;
I'm only fifteen, but when I am of age I'm going out into the big
world; so that's why I'm glad to know you, to use you like a kind of
dictionary. Are you coming back here again?"

"I hope so!" he exclaimed fervently.

"And so do I. In my cabin I have a long list of things written down in
my tablet that I'd like to know about; questions that come to me as I
sit looking over the hill into the sky, things Brick doesn't know, and
not even Bill Atkins. You going to tell me them there things?"

Bill interposed: "Will you kindly tell me those things?"

"Will you kindly tell me those things?" Lahoma put the revised
question as calmly as if she had not suffered correction.

"You see how it is, son," Willock remarked regretfully; "Lahoma keeps
pretty close to me, and I'm always a-leading her along the wrong
trails, not having laid out an extensive education when I was planning
the grounds I calculated to live in. When I got anything to say, I
just follows the easiest way, knowing I'll get to the end of it if I
talk constant. People in the big world ain't no more natural in
talking than in anything else. They builds up fences and arbitrary
walls, and is careful to stay right in the middle of the beaten path,
and I'm all time keeping Bill busy at putting up the bars after me, so
Lahoma will go straight."

"So that's why I'm glad to know you," Lahoma said gravely. "But why
did you want to know ME?" She fastened on him her luminous brown eyes,
with red lips parted, awaiting the clearing up of this mystery.

Wilfred preserved a solemn countenance, "I've been awfully lonesome,
Lahoma, the last two years because, up to that time, I'd lived in a
city with friends all about town and no end of gay times--and these
last two years, I've be