ind Jimmy Carter verry
mutch for taking you hossback so offen. I has been buggy ridin' with
an orficer who has killed injuns real! I am comin' back soon with grate
affeckshun, so luke out and mind."

But it was three years before she returned, and this was her last
and only letter. The "adopted fathers" of her children were faithful,
however, and when the new line was opened, and it was understood that
she was to be present with her father at the ceremony, they came, with
a common understanding, to the station to meet their old playmate. They
were ranged along the platform--poor Jack Roper a little overweighted
with a bundle he was carrying on his left arm. And then a young girl
in the freshness of her teens and the spotless purity of a muslin frock
that although brief in skirt was perfect in fit, faultlessly booted and
gloved, tripped from the train, and offered a delicate hand in turn to
each of her old friends. Nothing could be prettier than the smile on the
cheeks that were no longer sunburnt; nothing could be clearer than the
blue eyes lifted frankly to theirs. And yet, as she gracefully turned
away with her father, the faces of the four adopted parents were found
to be as red and embarrassed as her own on the day that Yuba Bill drove
up publicly with "Johnny Dear" on the box seat.

"You weren't such a fool," said Jack Montgomery to Roper, "as to bring
Misery here with you?"

"I was," said Roper with a constrained laugh--"and you?" He had just
caught sight of the head of a ninepin peeping from the manager's pocket.
The man laughed, and then the four turned silently away.

"Mary" had indeed come back to them; but not "The Mother of Five!"

BULGER'S REPUTATION

We all remembered very distinctly Bulger's advent in Rattlesnake Camp.
It was during the rainy season--a season singularly inducive to settled
reflective impressions as we sat and smoked around the stove in Mosby's
grocery. Like older and more civilized communities, we had our periodic
waves of sentiment and opinion, with the exception that they were more
evanescent with us, and as we had just passed through a fortnight of
dissipation and extravagance, owing to a visit from some gamblers and
speculators, we were now undergoing a severe moral revulsion, partly
induced by reduced finances and partly by the arrival of two families
with grownup daughters on the hill. It was raining, with occasional warm
breaths, through the open window, of the southw