some Pete has brought me news, and Toothy, and even your friend
Brayley! Do you know," mischief lurking in the depths of her eyes
above the assumed gravity of her face, "I think that the boys are
actually beginning to approve of you."

"Flattering, I must say!"

"I think that it is."

"Even," he cried, incredulously, wondering if she could jest so
earnestly--"even by such men as Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the
rest?"

She looked at him steadily, frowning a little bit.

"I don't know why you should speak of them so contemptuously. If, on
the one hand, they have had no great social advantages, on the other
hand have they not at least made men out of themselves?"

"I had hardly looked upon them in that light," he answered, with
something of the sneer still in his voice. "I had looked upon them
rather as I had supposed you were ready to consider me, as machines of
the type which ladies and gentlemen have to wait upon them, to do the
unskilled labor for them, as common laborers."

"Common laborers! I hate that word. They are men, aren't they? They
are stanch friends and good enemies. They are true to their own laws
and to their conceptions of right and wrong. And they are strong and
self-reliant and free and independent."

"And still they are ignorant, unrefined, coarse. Not your equals, Miss
Crawford, and, I thank God, not mine!"

"Not yours? Are you sure?"

"You are serious--or are you making fun of me?"

"I am very serious." There was no mistaking that when he looked into
her eyes.

"They are the sons of Smith and Jones and Brown," he replied slowly.
"Smith and Jones and Brown before them were uneducated, ignorant,
living lives with low horizons, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of the
greater world beyond their ken. They were a degree higher than the
horses which they mastered, the cattle which they drove to market. And
now their sons, inheriting the limited natures of their sires, have
grown like weeds in the environment in which fate put them, with no
knowledge of the other things. I think that it is answer enough when I
say that I am the son of William Conniston."

He did not mean to boast. He merely stated a simple fact simply. And
the scorn leaping up in her eyes, ringing in her clear voice as she
answered him, startled him.

"We know a man by his hands, not by his name!" she cried, her face
flushing with her eagerness. "Our admiration, our respect is always
for the man who does things, not for th