is pleasant,
tolerant fashion. "Sort of sympathetic butting in, isn't it? Guess heart
and sense never were a good team. I'd say Dora's chock full of heart."

"And it's just as well for someone around this house to have a bunch of
heart that can feel for other folks," Millie retorted promptly. "Say,
you, Mac, there's two days past since word went round of Steve's going,
and you haven't done a thing. Not a thing but continue to make life
miserable for those poor neches who can't help themselves, and have to
spend their play time in swallowing the dope you can't make filthy
enough to please your notions of humanity."

The man laughed up into the smiling, admonishing eyes of the woman who
meant so much to him.

"Hell!" he cried. "What would you have me do? Isn't it my job to see
those poor devils right? Why, they'd lap up dope till you couldn't tell
'em from a New York drug store. The fouler it tastes the more surely
they come back for more. I'd say I've lengthened the sick list of this
reserve till you'd think it was a Free Hospital, and there wasn't a
healthy neche, squaw, or pappoose north of 60 deg.."

Millie picked up the hat he had flung on the side table and hung it on a
peg of the coat rack.

"What would I have you do?" she said, ignoring the rest of his remarks
for the thought in her mind, and coming back to his chair and resting
her plump hand on his crisp hair. "Why something else besides think of
these scalliwag Indians. I'm all worried to death about Nita Allenwood
and Steve."

The man stirred uneasily under the caressing fingers.

"So am I," he cried brusquely. "Well?"

"That's just what it isn't," Millie had withdrawn her hand. She moved to
the doorway and gazed out into the sunlight. "I want to do something and
just don't know how to do it. I know you hate folks who 'slop over.' But
just think of the position. Steve's going to be away for two years,
according to his reckoning. They've sent Corporal Munday to take over
his post in his absence. What--what on earth is Nita to do in his
absence? She'll get her rations, and her pay, and all that. But--she
can't live around the post sort of keeping house for this boy--Munday.
She can't live there by herself anyway. Think of her by that shack with
her kiddie. Two years, here in a country----Besides--"

"'Besides' nothing," exclaimed the man with that curious irritation of a
troubled mind. "Is there need of 'besides' when you think of a
good-looker girl w