s relating a story of a mountain-lion he had once treed for an
Eastern artist to photograph.

"Just then the dern brute jumped right plum onto the feller and knocked
him down, machine and all; for a minute or two it was just a mixture o'
man and lion, then that feller come up top, and the next thing I seen he
batted the lion with his box, and that kind o' stunted the brute, and he
hit him again and glass began to fly; he was game all right, that feller
was. When the lion stiffened out, he turned to where I was a-rollin' on
the pine-needles, and says, quiet-like, 'Give me your revolver, please.'
I give it to him, and he put it to the lion's ear and finished him. When
he got up and looked at his machine he says, 'How much is a
mountain-lion skin worth?' ''Bout four dollars, green,' I says. He
looked at the inwards of his box, which was scattered all over the
ground. Says he, 'You wouldn't call that profitable, would you--a
seventy-dollar instrument in exchange for a four-dollar pelt?'"

Everybody laughed at this story, and the dinner came to an end with the
sheriff in excellent temper. Lawson offered cigars, and tolled him
across the road to the office, leaving Curtis alone in his library.

He resolutely set to work to present the situation of the sheriff's
presence concisely to the department in a telegram, and was still at
work upon this when Jennie entered the room, closed the curtains, and
lit the lamp.

Elsie came in a little later to say, sympathetically:

"Are you tired, Captain Curtis?"

He pushed his writing away.

"Yes, a little. The worst of it is, I keep saying: _If so and so
happens, then I must do thus and thus_, and that is the hardest work in
the world. I can deal with actual, well-defined conditions--even riots
and mobs--but fighting suppositions is like grappling with ghosts."

"I know what you mean," she replied, quickly. "But I want to ask
you--could father be of any help if I telegraphed him to come?"

He sat up very straight as she spoke, but did not reply till he turned
her suggestion over in his mind. "No--at least, not now. What troubles
me is this: the local papers will be filled with scare-heads to-morrow
morning; your father will see them, and will be alarmed about you."

"I will wire him that I am all right."

"You must do that. I consider you are perfectly safe, but at the same
time your father will think you ought not to be here, and blame me for
allowing you to come in; and, wor