ee
him and me in September."

"He did? Where did he come from?"

My father looked at me quickly. "Why do you ask?" he queried.

"I'll tell you when we have more time. Just now I'm engaged to fight the
Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, in which last
tribe my friend Jean Pahusca has pack right. He was in that gang of
devils that fought us out on the Arickaree."

For once I thought I knew more than my father, but he replied quietly,
"Yes, I knew he was there. His tether may be long, but its limit will be
reached some day."

"Who told you he was there, father?" I asked.

"Le Claire said so," he answered.

"Where was he at that time?" I was getting excited now.

"He spent the week in the little stone cabin out by the big cottonwood.
Took cold and had to go to St. Louis to a hospital for a week or two."

"He was in the haunted cabin the third week in September," I repeated
slowly; "then I don't know black from white any more."

My father smiled at me. "They call that being 'locoed' out on the
Plains, don't they?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. "You have a
delusion mixed up in your gray matter somewhere. One thing more," he
added as an unimportant afterthought, "I see Miss Melrose is still in
Topeka."

"Yes," I answered.

"And Tillhurst, too," he went on. "Well, there has been quite a little
story going around Conlow's shop and the post-office and Fingal's Creek
and other social centres about you two; and now when Tillhurst gets back
(he'll never make the cavalry), he's square, but a little vain and
thin-skinned, and he may add something of color and interest to the
story. Let it go. Just now it may be better so."

I thought his words were indefinite, for one whose purposes were always
definite, and in the wisdom of my youth I wondered whether he really
wanted me to follow Rachel's leading, or whether he was, after all,
inclined to believe Judson's assertion about his engagement, and family
pride had a little part to play with him. It was unlike John Baronet to
stoop to a thing like that.

"Father," I said, "I'm going away, too. I may never come back, and for
my own sake I want to assure you of one thing: no matter what Tillhurst
may say, if Rachel Melrose were ten times more handsome, if she had in
her own name a fortune such as I can never hope to acquire myself, she
would mean nothing to me. I care nothing for the stories now"--a
hopelessness would come into my voice--"but I do n