in Haney, though he never moved her in the same way that
the young barber did (for Ed Winchell had youth as well as comeliness,
and there is a divine suppleness in youth), yet he had been a welcome
guest. "A hundred thousand dollars a year! And yet he's been coming to
our little hotel for a year--to see me!"

This consideration was the one that moved her most. All the bland words,
the jocular phrases of his singular wooing came back to her now,
weighted with deep significance. She had called it "joshing," and had
put it all aside, just as she had parried the rude jests of the brakemen
of her acquaintance. Now she saw that he had been in earnest.

She was wise beyond her years, this calm-faced, keen-eyed girl, trained
by adversity to take care of herself. She knew instinctively that she
lived surrounded by wolves, and, much as she admired the big frame and
bold profile of Captain Haney, she had placed him among her enemies. His
coming always pleased her but at the same time put her upon the
defensive.

Strange to say, she enjoyed her position there in her battered little
hotel. "If it weren't for poor old mother--" She arrested herself and
went back to the counter with a certain timidity, a self-consciousness
new to her, fearing to face the gambler now that she knew his intent was
honorable.

The room was empty, all the men having gone out upon the walk to escape
the heat, and she took her seat behind her desk and gave herself up to a
consideration of the life to which the possession of so much wealth
would introduce her. She could have unlimited new gowns, she could
travel, and she could rescue her mother from drudgery and worry. These
things she could discern--but of the larger life which money could open
to her she could only vaguely dream.

The first effect of marrying Marshall Haney would be to cut short her
life in Sibley; the second, the establishment of a home in the great
camps about them.

As she looked around the dingy room buzzing with flies, she experienced
a premonitory pang of the pain she would suffer in going out of its
doors forever.

When Haney came back an hour later, he read in the cold, serious look
she gave him a warning, therefore he spoke but a few words on
commonplace subjects, and returned to his seat on the walk to await a
change in her mood.

This meekness on the part of a powerful man moved the girl, and a little
later she went to the doorway and said to the crowd generally, "It's