atch over her when the others were absent.
If he did not talk much to his "Missy" he kept a vigilant eye upon her,
and to-day he squatted in the shade beside her because the doctor and
David had gone after antelope and Leff was off somewhere on an
excursion of his own.

Susan, sewing, her face grave above her work, was not as pretty as
Susan smiling. She drew her eyebrows, thick and black, low over her
eyes with her habitual concentration in the occupation of the moment,
and her lips, pressed together, pouted, but not the disarming baby pout
which, when she was angry, made one forget the sullenness of her brows.
Her looks however, were of that fortunate kind which lose nothing from
the open air and large backgrounds. Dress added but little to such
attractions as she had. Fineness and elegance were not hers, but her
healthy, ripe brownness fitted into this sylvan setting where the city
beauty would have soon become a pale and draggled thing.

The robust blood of her French Canadian forebears was quickening to the
call of the trail. Was it the spirit of her adventurous ancestors that
made her feel a kinship with the wild, an indifference to its
privations, a joy in its rude liberty? She was thinner, but stronger
and more vigorous than when the train had started. She talked less and
yet her whole being seemed more vibrantly alive, her glance to have
gained the gleaming quietness of those whose eyes scan vague horizons.
She who had been heavy on her feet now stepped with a light
noiselessness, and her body showed its full woman's outlines
straightened and lengthened to the litheness of a boy. Her father
noticed that the Gallic strain in her seemed to be crowding out the
other. In Rochester, under city roofs, she had been at least half his.
On the trail, with the arch of the sky above and the illimitable earth
around her, she was throwing back to her mother's people.

Susan herself had no interest in these atavistic developments. She was
a healthy, uncomplicated, young animal, and she was enjoying herself as
she had never done before. Behind her the life of Rochester stretched
in a tranquil perspective of dull and colorless routine. Nothing had
ever happened. From her seventh year her father and Daddy John had
brought her up, made her the pet and plaything of their lonely lives,
rejoiced in her, wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she
had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to edu