week, I stood guard over my notice, enjoying the excitement it produced
and the comments it called forth. It was the advance wave of the
great ocean of civilization which many of them had been glad to leave
behind--some could have wished forever.

To Robert Muir, one of the farmers newly arrived, the notice was a
harbinger of good. It stood for progress, markets and a higher price
for land; albeit he wondered "hoo he wad be keepit up." But his
hard-wrought, quick-spoken little wife at his elbow "hooted" his
scruples and, thinking of her growing lads, welcomed with unmixed
satisfaction the coming of "the meenister." Her satisfaction was shared
by all the mothers and most of the fathers in the settlement; but by the
others, and especially by that rollicking, roistering crew, the Company
of the Noble Seven, the missionary's coming was viewed with varying
degrees of animosity. It meant a limitation of freedom in their wildly
reckless living. The "Permit" nights would now, to say the least, be
subject to criticism; the Sunday wolf-hunts and horse-races, with their
attendant delights, would now be pursued under the eye of the Church,
and this would not add to the enjoyment of them. One great charm of the
country, which Bruce, himself the son of an Edinburgh minister, and now
Secretary of the Noble Seven, described as "letting a fellow do as he
blanked pleased," would be gone. None resented more bitterly than he the
missionary's intrusion, which he declared to be an attempt "to
reimpose upon their freedom the trammels of an antiquated and bigoted
conventionality." But the rest of the Company, while not taking
so decided a stand, were agreed that the establishment of a church
institution was an objectionable and impertinent as well as unnecessary
proceeding.

Of course, Hi Kendal and his friend Bronco Bill had no opinion one way
or the other. The Church could hardly affect them even remotely. A dozen
years' stay in Montana had proved with sufficient clearness to them that
a church was a luxury of civilization the West might well do without.

Outside the Company of the Noble Seven there was only one whose opinion
had value in Swan Creek, and that was the Old Timer. The Company had
sought to bring him in by making him an honorary member, but he refused
to be drawn from his home far up among the hills, where he lived with
his little girl Gwen and her old half-breed nurse, Ponka. The approach
of the church he seemed to resent as