to supper and they went down to a meal that met all
the expectations aroused by the Governor's boast of the Walker cuisine.
Not only were the fried chicken and hot biscuits excellent, but Archie
found Miss Walker's society highly agreeable and stimulating. She wore a
snowy white apron over a blue gingham dress, and rose from time to time
to replenish the platters. The Governor chaffed her familiarly, and
Archie edged into the talk with an ease that surprised him. His
speculative faculties, all but benumbed by the violent exercise to which
they had been subjected since he joined the army of the hunted, found
new employment in an attempt to determine just how much this cheery,
handsome girl knew of the history of the company that met at her
father's table. She was the daughter of a retired crook, and it had
never occurred to him that crooks had daughters, or if they were so
blessed he had assumed that they were defectives, turned over for
rearing to disagreeable public institutions.

The Governor had said that they were to spend a day or two at Walker's
but Archie was now hoping that he would prolong the visit. When next he
saw Isabel he would relate, quite calmly and incidentally, his meteoric
nights through the underworld, and Sally, the incomparable dairy maid,
should dance merrily in his narrative. In a pleasant drawing-room
somewhere or other he would meet Isabel and rehabilitate himself in her
eyes by the very modesty with which he would relate his amazing tale. It
pleased him to reflect that if she could see him at the Walker table
with Red Leary and the Governor, that most accomplished of villains,
eating hot biscuits which had been specially forbidden by his physician,
she would undoubtedly decide that he had made a pretty literal
interpretation of her injunction to throw a challenge in the teeth of
fate.

Walker ate greedily, shoveling his food into his mouth with his knife;
and Archie had never before sat at meat with a man who used this means
of urging food into his vitals. The Governor magnanimously ignored his
friend's social errors, praising the chicken and delivering so
beautiful an oration on the home-made pickled peaches that Sally must
needs dart into the pantry and bring back a fresh jar which she placed
with a spoon by the Governor's plate.

At the end of the meal Walker left for town to put Leary on a train for
Boston. The veteran train robber shook hands all round and waved a last
farewell from t