d legislative interference. But the
doctor was a rich man, a necessity to his patients, a good marksman,
and, it was rumored, did not include his fellow men among the animals he
had a distaste for killing.

Of all this, however, Liberty knew little and cared less. The solitude
appealed to her sense of freedom; she did not "hanker" after a society
she had never known. At the end of the first week, when the doctor
communicated to her briefly, by letter, the convincing proofs of the
death of her father and his entombment beneath the sunken cliff, she
accepted the fact without comment or apparent emotion. Two months
later, when her only surviving relative, "Aunt Marty," of Missouri,
acknowledged the news--communicated by Doctor Ruysdael--with Scriptural
quotations and the cheerful hope that it "would be a lesson to her"
and she would "profit in her new place," she left her aunt's letter
unanswered.

She looked after the cows and calves with an interest that was almost
possessory, patronized and played with the squaw,--yet made her feel
her inferiority,--and moved among the peaceful aborigines with
the domination of a white woman and a superior. She tolerated the
half-monthly visits of "Jim Hoskins," the young companion of the doctor,
who she learned was the doctor's factor and overseer of the property,
who lived seven miles away on an agricultural clearing, and whose
control of her actions was evidently limited by the doctor,--for the
doctor's sake alone. Nor was Mr. Hoskins inclined to exceed those
limits. He looked upon her as something abnormal,--a "crank" as
remarkable in her way as her patron was in his, neuter of sex and vague
of race, and he simply restricted his supervision to the bringing
and taking of messages. She remained sole queen of the domain. A rare
straggler from the main road, penetrating this seclusion, might have
scarcely distinguished her from Waya, in her coarse cotton gown and
slouched hat, except for the free stride which contrasted with her
companion's waddle. Once, in following an estrayed calf, she had
crossed the highway and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger
dialect; yet the mistake left no sting in her memory. And, like the
digger, she shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard
taskmaster.

The sole touch of human interest she had in her surroundings was in the
rare visits of the doctor and his brief but sincere commendation of
her rude and rustic work. It is