relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand
dollars. I understand the railroad's willing to pay that."

"It's nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst," said
June. "Mother, you'd better set your cap for him."

"June Reed!" rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the
proposal provoked.

But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a
little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. She
_had_ thought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven,
and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling
term.

They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the
doctor's fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller's wife
suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a
little and went off to bed.

The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled
and fiddled before. One by one the doctor's friends tired of waiting for
him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of
the guard; the hour was two o'clock in the morning.

"I believe you'd just as well go to bed, Miss Horton," suggested
Bentley, "and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I
can't understand why he doesn't come back."

"I didn't know it was so late," she excused, rising to act on his
plainly sensible view of it.

"Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him," said
Bentley. "It's more than likely that he's run across some old friend and
is sitting talking somewhere. You've no notion how time slips by in such
a meeting."

"And perhaps he doesn't know of his good fortune yet," she suggested.

"Oh, it's all over town long ago," Walker put in. "He knows all about it
by this time."

"But it isn't like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such
good news with his friends," she objected.

"Not at all like him," agreed Bentley; "and that's what's worrying me."

She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her
compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily
flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the
snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within
revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had
been any bold person on the pry.

There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark
awaiting