jectured, concerning the finding of the grave little chap, and his
brief and none too happy sojourn in Borealis.

The preacher listened with sympathetic attention.

"Poor little fellow," he said, at the end. "It someway makes me think
of a thing that occurred near Bullionville. I was called to
Giant-Powder Gulch to give a man a decent burial. He had been on a
three-days' spree, and then had lain all night in the wet where the
horse-trough overflowed, and he died of quick pneumonia. Well, a man
there told me the fellow was a stranger to the Gulch. He said the
dissolute creature had appeared, on the first occasion, with a very
small child, a little boy, who he said had belonged to his sister, who
was dead. My informant said that just as soon as the fellow could
learn the location of a near-by Indian camp he had carried the little
boy away. The man who told me of it never heard of the child again,
and, in fact, had not been aware of the drunkard's return to the Gulch,
till he heard the man had died, in the rear of a highly notorious
saloon. I wonder if it's possible this quiet little chap is the same
little boy."

"It don't seem possible a livin' man--a white man--could have done a
thing like that," said Jim.

"No--it doesn't," Stowe agreed.

"And yet, it must have been in some such way little Skeezucks came to
be among the Injuns," Jim reflected, aloud. Then in a moment he added;
"I'm glad you told me, parson. I know now the low-down brute that sent
him off with the Piute hunters can't never come to Borealis and take
him away."

And yet, all through their homely breakfast old Jim was silently
thinking. A newer tenderness for the innocent, deserted little pilgrim
was welling in his heart.

Keno, having declared his intention of shovelling off the snow and
opening up a trench to uncover the gold-ledge of the miner's claim,
departed briskly when the meal was presently finished. Jim and the
preacher, with the pup, however, went at once to the home of Miss
Dennihan, where the children were all thus early engaged in starting
off the day of romping and fun.

The lunch that came along at noon, and the dinner that the happy Miss
Doc prepared at dusk, were mere interruptions in the play of the tiny
Carson and the lively little girls.

There never has been, and there never can be, a measure of childish
happiness, but surely never was a child in the world more happy than
the quaint little waif who had sat all