seen that
quick, shrewd, penetrating glance of the good Father's reading him
through and through.

"I have just come from the Mission," he said. "The Osages are always
loyal to the Union. The Verdigris River was too high for me to hear from
the villages in the southwest."

Tell was listening eagerly. So also were the two strangers who stood in
the doorway now. If the priest noted this he gave no sign. Mr. Dodd
spoke here for the first time.

"Well," he said in his pious intonation, "if the Osages are loyal, that
clears Jean here. He's an Osage, isn't he?"

Jean made no reply; neither did Le Claire, and Tell Mapleson turned
casually to the strangers, engaging them in conversation.

"We shall want our horses at four sharp in the morning," one of the two
came out to say to Cam. "We have a long hard day before us."

"At your service," answered Cam. "O'mie, take the order in your head."

"Is that the biggest hostler you've got?" looking contemptuously at
little O'mie standing beside me. "If you Kansas folks weren't such
damned abolitionists you'd have some able-bodied niggers to do your work
right."

O'mie winked at me and gave a low whistle. Neither the wink nor the
whistle was lost on the speaker, who frowned darkly at the boy.

Cam squinted up at the men good-naturedly. "Them horses dangerous?" he
asked.

"Yes, they are," the stranger replied. "Can we have a room downstairs?
We want to go to bed early. We have had a hard day."

"You can begin to say your 'Now I lay me' right away in here if you
like," and the landlord led the way into a room off the veranda. One of
the two lingered outside in conversation with Mapleson for a brief time.

"Come, go home with me, O'mie," I said later, when the crowd began to
thin out.

"Not me," he responded. "Didn't ye hear, 'four A. M. sharp'? It's me
flat on me bed till the dewy morn an' three-thirty av it. Them's vicious
horses. An' they'll be to curry clane airly. Phil," he added in a lower
voice, "this town's a little overrun wid strangers wid no partic'lar
business av their own, an' we don't need 'em in ours. For one private
citizen, I don't like it. The biggest one of them two men in there's
named Yeager, an' he's been here three toimes lately, stayin' only a few
hours each toime."

O'mie looked so little to me this evening! I had hardly noted how the
other boys had outgrown him.

"You're not very big for a horseman after all, my son, but you're grit
clear throug