rength, they possessed other compensating qualities which still made
them most interesting to an artist. Their gestures were unstudiedly
graceful, and their roughhewn faces were pleasant in expression. Ill
words or dark looks were rare among them.

In all external things they were quite obviously half-way from the tepee
to the cabin. Their homes consisted of small hovels of cottonwood logs,
set round with tall tepees and low lodges of canvas, used for
dormitories and kitchens in summer. A rack for drying meat rations was a
part of each family's possessions. They owned many minute ponies, and
their camps abounded in dogs of wolfish breed which they handled not at
all, for they were, as of old, merely the camp-guard.

Such were the salient characteristics of the Tetongs, westernmost
representatives of a once powerful race of hunters, whose home had been
far to the east, in a land of lakes, rivers, and forests. They were not
strangers to the young soldier; he knew their history and their habits
of thought. He now studied them to detect change and found
deterioration. "I am your friend," he said to them each and all. "I
come to do you good, to lead you in the new road. It is a strange road
to me also, for I, too, am a soldier and a hunter; but together we will
learn to make the earth produce meat for our eating. Put your hand in
mine."

He was plunged at once into a wilderness of work, but in his moments of
leisure the face of Elsie Brisbane came into his thought and her
resentment troubled him more than he cared to acknowledge. He well knew
that her birth and her training put her in hopeless opposition to all he
was planning to do for the Tetongs, and yet he determined to demonstrate
to her both the justice and the humanity of his position.

He knew her father's career very well. He had once travelled for two
days on the same railway train with him, and remembered him as a
boastful but powerful man, whose antagonism no one held in light esteem.
Andrew Brisbane had entered the State at a time when its mineral wealth
lay undeveloped and free to the taker, and having leagued himself with
men less masterly than himself but quite as unscrupulous, had set to
work to grasp and hold the natural resources of the great Territory--he
laid strong fists upon the mines and forests and grass of the wild land.
Once grasped, nothing was ever surrendered.

It mattered nothing to him and his kind that a race of men already lived
upon th