country than
their country perhaps understood. Their mother survived him only two
years. Katie sometimes said that her mother, too, gave her life to her
country. Her health had been undermined by hard living on the
frontier--she who had been so tenderly reared in her southern home--and
in the end she also died from a wound, that wound dealt the heart in the
death of her husband. Katie revered her father's memory and adored her
mother's, and while youth and Katie's indomitable spirit made it hard for
one to think of her as sad, the memory of those two was the deepest,
biggest thing in the girl's life.

"Oh Katie," Wayne suddenly roused himself to say, "your cousin Fred
Wayneworth is in town. I had luncheon with him over the river. He sent
all sorts of messages to you."

"Well--really! Messages! Why this haughty aloofness? Doesn't he mean to
come over?"

"Oh yes, of course; to-morrow--perhaps to-night. He's fearfully
busy--stopped off on his way East. There's a row on in the forest service
about some of Osborne's timber claims--mining claims, too, I believe--in
Colorado. Those years in the West have developed Fred splendidly. He's
gone from boy to man, and a fine specimen of man, at that."

"He likes his work?"

"Full of it." Wayne was silent for a moment, then added: "I envied him."

It startled Katie. "Envied him? Why--why, Wayne? Surely you're lucky."

He laughed: not the laugh of a man too pleased with his luck. "Oh, am I?
Perhaps I am, but just the same I envy a fellow who can look that way
when talking about his work."

"But you have a work, Wayne."

"No, I have a place."

She grew more and more puzzled. "Why, Wayne, you've been all wrapped up
in this thing you were doing."

He threw his cigarette away impatiently. "Oh yes, just for the sake of
doing it. I get a certain satisfaction in scheming things out. I must
say, however, I'd like to scheme out something I'd get some satisfaction
in having schemed out. A morsel of truth dropped from the mouth of a babe
a minute ago. You may have observed, Katie, that his inquiry was more
direct and reasonable than your reply. An improvement on a rifle. Not
such a satisfying thing to leave to a rifle eliminating future."

"But I didn't know the army admitted it was to be a rifle eliminating
future."

"I'm not saying that the army does," he laughed.

He passed again to that look of almost passionate concentration which
Katie had always supposed meant metallic fo