ho's barely twenty-two, with as dandy a baby as I've
ever set eyes on, and who I helped into daylight, sitting around without
her husband in a country that's peopled with white men whose morals
would disgrace a dog-wolf? Two years! Why, it makes me sweat thinking.
If that feller Steve don't see my way of looking at things I'm going to
tell him just what his parents ought to've been."

"And what's your way of thinking, Mac?" enquired his wife with the
confidence of certain knowledge.

"My way? My way?" the man exploded, his blue eyes widening with
incredulity. "Why, the way he's got to look. The way sense lies. That
girl and her kiddie have got to come right along here and camp with us
till the boy gets back. There's going to be no darn nonsense," he added
threateningly, as though Millie were protesting. "She's going to come
right here, where you can keep your dandy eye on her till----"

"Eyes--plural, Mac." Millie's smile was a goodly match for the summer
day.

The doctor flung his head back in a deep-throated guffaw.

"Have it your own way," he cried. "One or two, they don't miss much.
Anyway, I guessed I'd put it to you before I went over to fix things
up."

"Sure," laughed Millie comfortably. "You most generally ask my consent
before you get busy." Then, in a moment, she became serious. "But you're
right, Mac," she said. "Dora and I have been talking that way ever since
we heard. And Mabel swears she's going to write the Commissioner of
Police all she thinks about it, and that's 'some.' It's cruel sending
off a married man on a trip like that without fixing things for his
wife. You see and fix things, Mac. Nita's just as welcome as a ray of
sunshine right here with us. It's a shame! It's a wicked downright
shame! And Steve ought to know better than to stand for it. He ought
to----"

"He can't kick." The man shook his head. "He's looking to get a
superintendentship. A kick would fix that for good. No, he's got no kick
coming. You need to understand the Police force right. It's no use
talking that way. It's the work of the force first, last, and all the
time. Everything else is nowhere, and the womenfolk, whom they
discourage, last of all. And mind you, they're right. You can't run a
family, and this hellish country at the same time. If the Police weren't
what they were it would need seventy thousand of them instead of seven
hundred to make this territory better than a sink of crime for every low
down skunk wh