mother and little Sarah. They're gone now."

Sarah? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking. He had heard of a
sister of McKinstry's, sick for years with some terrible disease, whom
he had nursed until the end. She was Sarah, most likely. Well, that was
what _his_ life had been given up for, was it? There was a twitching
about McKinstry's wide mouth: Paul looked away from him a moment, and
then, glancing furtively back, began again.

"No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac. The great discovery of this
age is woman, old fellow! I've been, knocked about too much not to have
lost all delusions about them. It did well enough for the crusading
times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots; but
in these rough-and-tumble days we'd better give 'em their places as
flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men."

The Captain never argued.

"I don't know," he said, dryly.

After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine,
self-assertant figure of his companion,--at the face, acrid, unyielding,
beneath its surface-heat: ruminating mildly to himself on what a good
thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women.
This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those
he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a
vague, moony compassion: the usual Western vision of a Yankee female
in his head,--Bloomer-clad, hatchet-faced, capable of anything, from
courting a husband to commanding a ship. (It is all your fault, genuine
women of New England! Why don't you come among us, and know your
country, and let your country know you? Better learn the meaning of
Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)

They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where
the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of
coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.

"Hillo! this means iron," said the Doctor, climbing up the bank,
cat-like, to break off a bit; "and here an odd formation, Mac. Take it
in to old Gurney."

The Captain cleaned his spectacles with piece of chamois-leather, put
them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his
pocket, before he took the bit of rock.

"All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the
enemy," thought Blecker, jumping down on the track.

"Give it to old Gurney, Mac. It will ins