OMAN WOULD

The two pleasantest days of a woman are her marriage day and the
day of her funeral.--_Hipponax_.

My garden at the Willamette might languish if it liked, and my little
cabin might stand in uncut wheat. For me, there were other matters of
more importance now. I took leave of hospitable Doctor McLaughlin at
Fort Vancouver with proper expressions of the obligation due for his
hospitality; but I said nothing to him, of course, of having met the
mysterious baroness, nor did I mention definitely that I intended to
meet them both again at no distant date. None the less, I prepared to
set out at once up the Columbia River trail.

From Fort Vancouver to the missions at Wailatpu was a distance by trail
of more than two hundred miles. This I covered horseback, rapidly, and
arrived two or three days in advance of the English. Nothing disturbed
the quiet until, before noon of one day, we heard the gun fire and the
shoutings which in that country customarily made announcement of the
arrival of a party of travelers. Being on the lookout for these, I soon
discovered them to be my late friends of the Hudson Bay Post.

One old brown woman, unhappily astride a native pony, I took to be
Threlka, my lady's servant, but she rode with her class, at the rear. I
looked again, until I found the baroness, clad in buckskins and blue
cloth, brave as any in finery of the frontier. Doctor McLaughlin saw fit
to present us formally, or rather carelessly, it not seeming to him that
two so different would meet often in the future; and of course there
being no dream even in his shrewd mind that we had ever met in the past.
This supposition fitted our plans, even though it kept us apart. I was
but a common emigrant farmer, camping like my kind. She, being of
distinction, dwelt with the Hudson Bay party in the mission buildings.

We lived on here for a week, visiting back and forth in amity, as I must
say. I grew to like well enough those blunt young fellows of the Navy.
With young Lieutenant Peel especially I struck up something of a
friendship. If he remained hopelessly British, at least I presume I
remained quite as hopelessly American; so that we came to set aside the
topic of conversation on which we could not agree.

"There is something about which you don't know," he said to me, one
evening. "I am wholly unacquainted with the interior of your country.
What would you say, for instance, regarding its safety for a lady
tra