for whom she now had no flesh-and-blood
prototype, was suggested only by her moods and her books. As the
sun-clear days of maidenhood melted imperceptibly into summer glow and
winter spaces, the memory of Wilfred's face and voice sometimes
surprised her at unexpected turns of solitary musings. But the face
grew less defined, the voice lost its distinctive tone, as the years
passed uninterruptedly by.

"I reckon it ain't right," said Brick Willock to Bill Atkins as they
went one morning to examine their traps before Lahoma was astir, "to
keep our little gal to ourselves as we're doing. You're getting old,
Bill, awful old--"

"Well, damn it," growled Bill, "I guess I don't have to be told!"

"You ain't very long for this world, Bill, not in the ordinary course
of nature. And when I've laid you to rest under the rock-pile, Lahoma
ain't going to find the variety in me that she now has in the two of
us. Besides which, I'm in the fifties myself, and them is halves of
hundreds."

"Yes," Bill growled, "and give Lahoma time, she'll die, too. Nothing
but the mountain'll be left to look out on the plains. Lord, Brick, who
do you reckon'll be living in that cove, when we three are dead and
gone?"

"Guess I'll be worrying about something else, then."

"Do you reckon," pursued Bill, in an unwonted tone of mellowness, "that
those who come to live in our dugout will ever imagine what happy hours
we've passed there, just sitting around quiet and enjoying ourselves
and one another?"

"They wouldn't imagine YOU was enjoying of yourself, not if they was
feeding their eyes on you every day. But I'm awful bothered about
Lahoma. I tell you, it ain't right to keep her shut up as in a cage.
Can't you see she's pining for high society such as I ain't got it in
me to supply, and you are too cussed obstinate to display?"

"I guess that's so." Bill drew himself stiffly up by the tree
above--they were ascending the wooded gully that extended from base to
mountain-top.

"Well, what's the hurry? She's only seventeen years old."

"Yes, she was only seventeen years old, two years ago; but she's
nineteen, now."

Bill Atkins sank upon a rock at the foot of a bristling cedar.
"Nineteen! Who, LAHOMA? Then where've I been all the time?"

"You've been a-traveling along at a pretty fast clip toward your last
days, that's where you've been. Just look at yourself! Ain't you
always careful in making your steps as if scared of breakin