f comfort. That dear
woman was not in any of the later pictures. A pile of stones on a
hillside in Brown's Park marked the grave.

Between the day of 'Lindy Tolliver's outburst of grief and the child's
next recollection was a gap. The setting of the succeeding memories was a
frame house on a dusty road at the edge of a frontier town. In front of
it jolted big freight wagons, three of them fastened together and drawn
by a double row of oxen so long she could not count them. The place was
Rawlins, Wyoming, and it was an outfitting point for a back country in
Colorado hundreds of miles from the railroad. The chief figure in June's
horizon was a stern-eyed, angular aunt who took the place of both father
and mother and did her duty implacably. The two lived together forever,
it seemed to the child.

June wakened one night from the light of a lamp in her aunt's hand. A man
was standing beside her. He was gaunt and pallid, in his eyes a look of
hunger that reminded her of a hunted coyote. When he took her tightly in
his arms she began to cry. He had murmured, "My li'l' baby, don't you be
scared of yore paw." As mysteriously as he had come to life, so Pete
Tolliver disappeared again.

Afterward there was a journey with a freight outfit which lasted days and
days. June was in charge of a bullwhacker. All she remembered about him
was that he had been kind to her and had expended a crackling vocabulary
on his oxen. The end of the trek brought her to Piceance Creek and a
father now heavily bearded and with long, unkempt hair. They had lived
here ever since.

Did this big man by the window belong to her father's covered past? Was
there menace in his coming? Vaguely June felt that there was.

The door opened and Tolliver stepped in. He was rather under middle-size,
dressed in down-at-the-heel boots, butternut jeans, cotton shirt, and
dusty, ragged slouch hat. The grizzled beard hid the weak mouth, but the
skim-milk eyes, the expression of the small-featured face, betrayed the
man's lack of force. You may meet ten thousand like him west of the
Mississippi. He lives in every village, up every creek, in every valley,
and always he is the cat's-paw of stronger men who use him for good or
ill to serve their ends.

The nester stopped in his tracks. It was impossible for June to miss the
dismay that found outlet in the fallen jaw and startled eyes.

In the stranger's grin was triumphant malice. "You sure look glad to see
me, Pete, a