ers and certain, ineradicable instincts.
The gentleman adventurer was not unknown on the plains. Sometimes he
had fled from a dark past, sometimes taken to the wild because the
restraints of civilization pressed too hard upon the elbows of his
liberty.

"He's evidently of French Creole blood," said the doctor. "Many of
those people who came up from New Orleans and settled in St. Louis were
of high family and station."

"Then why should he be out here, dressed like an Indian and wandering
round with all sorts of waifs and strays? I believe he's just the same
kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does come from
educated people, there's something wrong about him, and he's had to
come out here and hide."

"Oh, what a suspicious little Missy! Nothing would make me believe
that. He may be rough, but he's not crooked. Those steady,
straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an honest man. No, my
dear, there's no discreditable past behind him, and he's a gentleman."

"Rubbish!" she said pettishly. "You'll be saying Leff's a gentleman
next."

From which it will be seen that Low Courant had not been communicative
about himself. Such broken scraps of information as he had dropped,
when pieced together made a scanty narrative. His grandfather had been
one of the early French settlers of St. Louis, and his father a
prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did
not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young--thirty
perhaps--it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years.
He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke the
language of the Black Feet and Crows. He had passed a winter in the
old Spanish town of Santa Fe, and from there joined a regiment of
United States troops and done his share of fighting in the Mexican War.
Now the wanderlust was on him, he was going to California.

"Maybe to settle," he told the doctor. "If I don't wake up some
morning and feel the need to move once more."

When they reached the fort he was hailed joyously by the bourgeois
himself. The men clustered about him, and there were loud-voiced
greetings and much questioning, a rumor having filtered to his old
stamping ground that he had been killed in the siege of the Alamo. The
doctor told the bourgeois that Courant was to go with his train to
California, and the apple-cheeked factor grinned and raised his
eyebrows:

"Vous avez de la chance! He's a good