r?"

As he lifted the cover and looked in the basket, "Cutie's" pupils
enlarged and she shrank from him. "Cutie" had a good memory.

"Luckily for her I did not," Miss Gaskett answered. "If I had, I should
have lost her."

"Lost her?"

"Coyotes."

"They would have _eaten_ her?"

Miss Gaskett nodded.

"Undoubteely. They were thick as anything. They howled hideously every
morning before sunrise, and it was not safe to leave one's tent at night
without a weapon."

"Whew!" Mr. Cone's lips puckered in a whistle.

His astonishment inspired Miss Gaskett to continue:

"Yes, indeed! And once when I was out walking ever so far from everybody
I met one face to face. My first impulse was to run, but I thought if I
did so it might attack me, so, trying not to show that I was frightened,
I picked up a stick, and just then----"

Seeing that Mr. Cone's gaze wandered, Miss Gaskett paused to learn the
cause of it. She flushed as she found that Mrs. Budlong, with a smile
wreathing her face, was listening to the recital.

"I'll tell you the rest when you are not so busy," Miss Mattie said,
taking her key from Mr. Cone hastily.

Mrs. Budlong declared that her pleasure equalled his own when Mr. Cone
expressed his delight at seeing her, and there was no thought on the
minds of either as to the hotel rules she had violated or the food she
had carried away from the table in the front of her blouse and her
reticule.

"You are looking in splendid health, Mrs. Budlong," he asserted, quite
as if that lady ever had looked otherwise.

"Yes, the change benefited me greatly." A stranger might have gathered
from the plaintive note in her voice that prior to her trip she had
been an invalid.

"You, too, found the Western country interesting?"

"Oh, very! At heart, Mr. Cone, I am a Child of Nature, and the primitive
always appeals to me strongly," Mrs. Budlong hesitated and seemed
debating. Having made her decision she asked in an undertone:

"I can trust you?"

"_Absolutely_," replied Mr. Cone with emphasis, which intimated that the
torture chamber could not wring from him any secret she chose to
deposit.

"I had a very peculiar experience in the Yellowstone. I should never
mention it, if you were not more like a brother to me than a stranger.
It is altogether shocking."

Mr. Cone's eyes sparkled.

"Purely in a spirit of adventure, I took a bath in a beaver dam. It was
in a secluded spot, and so well protected that I went in