--?"

"You see," he went on, "the boss wrote from Helena to know how things
were going. I drew a picture of a freezing, starving cow, and wrote
back, 'This is how.' The boss showed that picture around, and some
folk thought it bore so much family resemblance to a starving cow that
on the strength of it they gambled on me. They staked me to an
education in illustrating and painting."

"And you made good!" she concluded, enthusiastically.

"I hope to make good," he smiled.

After a pause, she said:

"If you were not busy, I'd guide you to some places along the creek
where there are wonderful things to see."

The man reached for his discarded hat.

"Take me there," he begged.

"Where?" she demanded. "I spoke of several places."

"To any of them," he promptly replied; "better yet, to all of them."

She shook her head dubiously.

"I ought not to begin as an interruption," she demurred.

"On the contrary," he argued confidently, "the good general first
acquaints himself with his field."

An hour later, standing at a gap in a tangle of briar, where the
paw-paw trees grew thick, he watched her crossing the meadow toward
the roof of her house which topped the foliage not far away. Then, he
held up his right hand, and scrutinized the scar, almost invisible
under the tan. It seemed to him to grow larger as he looked.

CHAPTER V

Horton House, where Duska Filson made her home with her aunt and
uncle, was a half-mile from the cabin in which the two painters were
lodged. That was the distance reckoned via driveway and turnpike, but
a path, linking the houses, reduced it to a quarter of a mile. This
"air line," as Steele dubbed it, led from the hill where the cabin
perched, through a blackberry thicket and paw-paw grove, across a
meadow, and then entered, by a picket gate and rose-cumbered fence,
the old-fashioned garden of the "big house."

Before the men had been long at their summer place, the path had
become as well worn as neighborly paths should be. To the gracious
household at Horton House, they were "the boys." Steele had been on
lifelong terms of intimacy, and the guest was at once taken into the
family on the same basis as the host.

"Horton House" was a temple dedicated to hospitality. Mrs. Horton,
its delightful mistress, occasionally smiled at the somewhat
pretentious name, but it had been "Horton House" when the Nashville
stage rumbled along the turnpike, and the picturesque little village