, discriminating, and vigilant eye of
eternal justice was riveted upon Steve Barclay, the stage-driver. Few of
us suspected Steve; he was a good-natured, inoffensive fellow; it seemed
the idlest folly to surmise that he could have been in collusion with the
highwaymen. But Mr. Mills had his own ideas on the subject; he was a man
of positive convictions, and, having pretty nearly always demonstrated
that he was in the right, it boded ill for Steve Barclay when Mr. Mills
made up his mind that Steve must have been concerned in one way or
another in that Magpie Glen crime.

The wooing of Miss Woppit pursued the even tenor of its curious triple
way. Wars and rumors of wars served merely to imbue it with certain
heroic fervor. Jake Dodsley's contributions to the "Leadville Herald"
and to Henry Feldwisch's Denver "Inter-Ocean," though still aimed at the
virgin mistress of The Bower, were pitched in a more exalted key and
breathed a spirit that defied all human dangers. What though death
confronted the poet and the brutal malice of nocturnal marauders
threatened the object of his adoration, what, short of superhuman
intervention, should prevent the poet from baffling all hostile
environments and placing the queen of his heart securely upon his throne
beside him, etc., etc.? We all know how the poets go it when they once
get started. The Magpie Glen affair gave Jake Dodsley a new impulse, and
marked copies of his wonderful effusions found their way to the Woppit
cabin in amazing plenty and with exceeding frequency. In a moment of
vindictive bitterness was Barber Sam heard to intimate that the robbery
was particularly to be regretted for having served to open the sluices of
Jake Dodsley's poetic soul.

'T was the purest comedy, this wooing was; through it all the finger of
fate traced a deep line of pathos. The poetic Dodsley, with his
inexhaustible fund of rhyme, of optimism and of subtlety; Barber Sam,
with his envy, his jealousy, and his garrulity; Three-fingered Hoover
with his manly yearning, timorousness, tenderness, and awkwardness--these
three in a seemingly vain quest of love reciprocated; the girl, fair,
lonely, dutiful--filled with devotion to her brother and striving, amid
it all, to preserve a proper womanly neutrality toward these other men;
there was in this little comedy among those distant hills so much of real
pathos.

As for Jim Woppit, he showed not the slightest partiality toward any one
of the th