nters.

He took small credit to himself for any temerity he had shown. Somehow
it seemed to him that the thing had been made very easy. He felt
moderately sure that he owed his safety to the villainous-looking man in
the black beard; and, indeed, that was quite in order, for he had been
given to understand that Providence was not above making use of the
meanest instruments to the accomplishment of a good end. There were
times when he was even constrained to hope that, by the same Great
Influence, a spark of magnanimity had been awakened in Christie's
abandoned soul; and once, when Eliza reported that her "pa" had given
her a nickle, he almost believed that those seemingly ineffective words
of his had, thanks to that same all-powerful intervention, made an
impression. He became positively hopeful that this might be the case,
when nearly a month had passed, and no further harm had come to his
"lamb."

One morning Bella Jones, who ordinarily kept rather fashionable hours,
came panting up the hill, the first to arrive. She was a dressy young
person, whose father kept a "sample-room." Looking hastily about, to
make sure that no one was there to have forestalled her, she cried,
still quite out of breath:

"Eliza Christie, she's lost her ma! Died in the night of a hemorag!
Eliza ain't cried a drop, 'n her pa he's just settin' there like he was
shot!"

"Like he was shot!" Simon shivered at the words as if a cold wind had
passed, striking a chill through the intense August day.

The professor kept school that morning as usual, but he did not sit on
the settle against the lean-to, and when Patsy Lenders undertook to
hoist himself up on it, the boy got his ears boxed. Patsy stated
afterwards, in maintenance of the justifiable pride of "ten years goin'
on eleven," that he "wouldn't ha' took it from anybody but the
perfessor," and he "wouldn't ha' took it from him, if 't hadn't a ben
for that snake!"

It was high noon. The sun was pouring down upon the group of children in
the clearing in front of the lop-sided cabin, and upon the empty settle
up against it; upon the brooding heights that spanned the horizon beyond
the Gulch, upon the fragrant pine-trees close at hand. Simon Jr. had
just strayed along with a blossoming yucca protruding from his mouth,
and the professor had driven him farther up the slope. Returning from
this short excursion, Simon beheld two figures coming up the Gulch; a
blond-bearded man, and a little girl