pointedly and more impersonally than ever.

"It's more than consolatory," he said with an accentuating flourish of
the little briar pipe. "It's quite compensatory."

It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both
verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry.

"Do you want to get out of that hole?" I demanded. For it's a law of
the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in
distress.

"Not if it means an ending to this interview," he told me.

It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn't much warmth in the
inspection.

"What are you trying to do?" I calmly inquired, for prairie life
hadn't exactly left me a shy and timorous gazelle in the haunts of
that stalker known as Man.

"I'm trying to figure out," he just as calmly retorted, apparently
quite unimpressed by my uppity tone, "how anything as radiant and
lovely as you ever got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and
coyotes."

The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make love to me. And I
then and there decided to put a brake on his wheel of eloquence.

"And I'm still trying to figure out," I told him, "how what impresses
me as rather a third-class type of man is able to ride around in what
looks like a first-class car! Unless," and the thought came to me out
of a clear sky, and when they come that way they're inspirations and
are usually true, "unless you stole it!"

He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking vehicle and studied it
from end to end.

"If I'm that far behind Hyacinthe," he indifferently acknowledged, "I
begin to fathom the secret of my life failure. So my morning hasn't
been altogether wasted."

"But you did steal the car?" I persisted.

"That must be a secret between us," he said, with a distinctly guilty
look about the sky-line, as though to make sure there were no sheriffs
and bloodhounds on his track.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded, determined to thrash the thing
out, now that it had been thrust upon me.

"Talking to the most charming woman I've encountered west of the Great
Lakes," he said with an ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile.
But I didn't intend him to draw a herring across the trail.

"I'd be obliged if you'd be sincere," I told him, sitting up a little
straighter on Paddy.

"I am sincere," he protested, putting away his pipe.

"But the things you're saying are the things the right sort of person
refrains from expressing, even when he happens to be the