neers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen
who rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the
palisade of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed
upon the settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last.
Cerebrospinal meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the
memory of that time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis
was past, was still fresh on the tongues of all.

Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her
husband had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she
in everything. And since then, twelve years before, she had seen
generations of lovers pass into the land they thought delectable; and
their children flocked to her, hung about her, were carried off by her
to the ranch, and kept for days, against the laughing protests of their
parents. Flood Rawley called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed
she had a voice that fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note,
that the hardest faces softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep
its best notes for the few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no
woman was her enemy, and every man was her friend--and nothing more. She
had never had an accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her.
Every man except one had given up hope that he might win her; and though
he had been gone from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the
days before the Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was
now to return and say again what he had mutely said for years--what she
understood, and he knew she understood.

Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day. He was a rough
diamond, but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its
heart, its courage, its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite
gentleness, strenuous to exaggeration, with a very primitive religion;
and the only religion Tim knew was that of human nature. Jansen did not
think Tim good enough--not within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but
they thought him better than any one else.

But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs,
and those people who still retain their heads in the eddy of religious
emotion were in despair. They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from
the "protracted meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what
she said and did. What they he