s
grandfather, but Lucetta knew a little more about the older generations,
and she dug the individuals out one by one, offering them to Prime as
spurs to further rememberings.

"No, I don't remember anything about Jabez," he said. "And Elvira and
Elmina and John I never heard mentioned. Grandfather Bankhead had no
near relations that I know of except his brother Jasper and his cousin
Lorinda, who grew up with him."

"I seem to remember something about grandmother's cousin Jasper,"
Lucetta put in. "Didn't something happen to him--something out of the
usual?"

"Yes," was the prompt reply. "He disappeared--went to the Far West when
he was a young man and was never heard of afterward. Grandfather often
wondered what had become of him, and in his later years spoke of him
quite frequently."

Lucetta went on with her mending, the fish-bone needle making her
progress primitively slow. Prime got up and strolled down to the
river-bank. When he returned he went around to her side of the fire to
say:

"I'm mighty glad we have found out that we are cousins, Lucetta; twice
glad, for your sake. It makes things a bit easier for you, doesn't it?"

She did not look up.

"Why should it?" she asked quietly.

"Oh, I don't know; we have both been throwing tin cans and brickbats at
the conventions; but I haven't any idea that we have killed them off
permanently. And they die harder in a woman than in a man. We have
jollied things along pretty well, so far, but that isn't saying that I
haven't known how hard it must have been for you. As matters stand now,
I am your natural protector."

She looked up with the quaint little smile that he had learned to know,
to interpret, and to love.

"What difference does the relationship make, Donald, so long as you are
what you are? And what difference would it make if you happened to be
the other kind of man?"

He stood smiling down upon her with his hands in his pockets.

"Your trust is the most wonderful thing in this world, Lucetta--and the
most beautiful. I should have to be a much worse man than I have ever
dared to be to do anything to spoil it," he said slowly, and with that
he went to set up her sleeping-tent.

XIII

AT CAMP COUSIN

PRIME whittled through the better part of the succeeding forenoon on the
paddles, and for the midday bread Lucetta tried her domestic-science
hand upon the dried and reground flo