another cigarette for the injured woman it being no time for
words.

"It just goes to show," she observed after the first relishing draft,
"that we should be honest, even with defectives like old Timmins. This
man in Seattle that keeps track of prices for me writes that the top of
the mule market has blown sky-high; that if I got anything looking at all
like a mule not to let it go off the place for less than two hundred
dollars, because mule buyers is sure desperate. Safety must of got the
same tip, only you can bet his correspondent put the full three cents
on the letter. Safety would never have trusted a strange postmaster with
the excess. Anyway he sold that bunch of rabbits a week later for one
hundred and seventy-five a head, thus adding twenty-two hundred and fifty
dollars of my money to his tainted fortune. You can imagine the pins and
needles he'd been on for a week, scared I'd get the tip and knowing if he
even mentioned them runts at any price whatever that I'd be wise at once.
That joke of the boys must of seemed heaven-sent to him.

"You ought to heard the lecture I read them fool punchers on common
honesty and how the biter is always bit. I scared 'em good; there hasn't
been an elephant on the place since that day. They're a chastened lot,
all right. I was chastened myself. I admit it. I don't hardly believe
I'll ever attempt anything crooked on old Safety again---and yet, I don't
know."

The lady viciously expelled the last smoke from her cigarette and again
took up the knitting.

"I don't really know but if there was some wanton, duplicity come up that
I could handle myself and not have to leave to that pack of amateur
thieves out in the bunk house, and it was dead sure and I didn't risk
doing more than two years' penal servitude--yes, I really don't know.
Even now mebbe all ain't over between us."

II

A LOVE STORY

I had for some time been noting a slight theatrical tinge to the
periodical literature supported by the big table in the Arrowhead living
room. Chiefly the table's burden is composed of trade journals of the
sober quality of the _Stockbreeder's Gazette_ or _Mine, Quarry & Derrick_
or the "Farmer's Almanac." But if, for example, one really tired of a
vivacious column headed "Chats on Fertilizers" one could, by shuffling
the litter, come upon a less sordid magazine frankly abandoned to the
interests of the screen drama.

The one I best recall has limned upon its cover in accept