I thanked the Lord
she was game when I remembered what I had to tell her before I was
through.

"Dad and Hans Rutter, as you know, weren't the sort of men to sit around
and mourn over anything like that," she laughed. "I don't know where
they got the idea of going to Peace River. But dad settled me and Mammy
Thomas in a little cottage in Austin, and they started. I wanted to go
along, but dad wouldn't hear of it. They've been gone a little over two
years. I'd get word from them about every three months, and early this
spring dad wrote that they had made a good stake and were coming home.
He said I could come as far as Benton to meet them, and we would take
the boat from there down to St. Louis. So I looked up the lay of the
country, and sent him word I would come as far as Walsh. He had said
they would come out by way of this place. And then I rounded up Mammy
Thomas and struck out. I've rather enjoyed the trip, too. They should be
here any day, now."

My conscience importuned me to tell her bluntly that they would only
come into Walsh feet first. But I dodged the unpleasant opening. There
was another matter I wanted to touch upon first.

"Look here, Lyn," I said--rather dubiously, it must be confessed, for I
didn't know how she would take it, "I'm going to tell you something on
my own responsibility, and you mustn't get the idea that I'm trying to
mix into your personal affairs without a warrant. But I have a hunch
that you're laboring under a mistaken impression, right now; that is, if
you care anything about an old friend like MacRae."

"I can't really say that I do, though," she assured me quickly, but she
colored in a way that convinced me that her feeling toward MacRae was of
the sort she would never admit to any one but himself.

"Well," I continued, "I imagined you would think it queer that he should
pass you up as he did a while ago. But here at Fort Walsh we're among a
class of people that are a heap different from Texas cow-punchers. These
redcoats move along social lines that don't look like much to a cowman;
but once in the Force you must abide by them. It was consideration for
you that forbade MacRae to stop. Any woman in the company of an officer
is taboo to an enlisted man, according----"

"I know all that," she interrupted impatiently. "Probably they'd cut me,
and all that sort of thing. I understand their point of view, exactly,
but I'm not here to play the social game, and I shall talk to whom i