for, and when we'd finally sent the
young woman off Martin turned on him.

"Young feller," said he--and his eyes were black--"I've rattled around
for thirty years and seen many a good and many a bad man, but I never
before seen such an intelligent dam' fool as you are."

"What do you mean?" said the boy.

"You've broke about the only law that this here country boasts of--the
law of hospitality."

"He didn't mean it that way," I spoke up. "Did you, Monty?"

"Certainly not. I'd help anybody out of trouble--man or woman--but I
refuse to mix with that kind of people socially."

"'That kind of people,'" yelled the old man. "And what's the matter with
that kind of people? You come creeping out of the milk-and-water East,
all pink and perfumed up, and when you get into a bacon-and-beans
country where people sweat instead of perspiring you wrinkle your nose
like a calf and whine about the kind of people you find. What do you
know about people, anyhow? Did you ever want to steal?"

"Of course not," said Prosser, who kept his temper.

"Did you ever want to drink whisky so bad you couldn't stand it?"

"No."

"Did you ever want to kill a man?"

"No."

"Were you ever broke and friendless and hopeless?"

"Why, I can't say I ever was."

"And you've never been downright hungry, either, where you didn't know
if you'd ever eat again, have you? Then what license have you got to
blame people for the condition you find them in? How do you know what
brought this girl where she is?"

"Oh, I pity any woman who is adrift on the world, if that's what you
mean, but I won't make a pet out of her just because she is friendless.
She must expect that when she chooses her life. Her kind are bad--bad
all through. They must be."

"Not on your life. Decency runs deeper than the hives."

"Trouble with you," said I, "you've got a juvenile standard--things are
all good or all bad in your eyes--and you can't like a person unless the
one overbalances the other. When you are older you'll find that people
are like gold-mines, with a thin streak of pay on bed-rock and lots of
hard digging above."

"I didn't mean to be discourteous," our man continued, "but I'll never
change my feelings about such things. Mind you, I'm not preaching, nor
asking you to change your habits--all I want is a chance to live my own
life clean."

The mail came in during March, five hundred pounds of it, and the camp
went daffy.

Monty had the dogs harnessed ten