s I'd like them to be.

But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That beetle-headed
suspicion has passed slowly but surely away, like a snow-man
confronted by a too affectionate sun. It slipped away from me little
by little, and began losing its lines, not so much when I found that
Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of _Marius The
Epicurean_ and walked about in undergarments that were expensive
enough for a _prima donna_, but more because I found myself face to
face with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was not to be
dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put him through his paces.

I began by telling him that I didn't seem to know a great deal about
him.

"The closed makimono," he cryptically retorted, "is the symbol of
wisdom."

I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I tried another tack.

"Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in this frontier life,
like worms in a bait-tin. So they naturally need to know what they're
tangled up with."

Peter, at that, began to look unhappy.

"Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the
country?" I asked.

"Would you mind telling me what brought _you_ to this part of the
country?" countered Peter.

"My husband," I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But
he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.

"I was interested," he explained with a shrug of finality, "in the
nesting-ground of the Canada goose!"

"Then you came to the right point," I promptly retorted. "For _I_ am
it!"

But he didn't smile, as I'd expected him to do. He seemed to feel that
something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.

"I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest
settlers," he went on. "This settler, I might add, came to your
province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from
one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic
order of archisaurian gentlemen known as _Dinosauria_, and there's
about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous
dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science.
And I _am_, though to nothing else. I'm as free as the wind, dear
lady, or I wouldn't be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes
my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other,
has the power of making my heart ache."

"_Verboten!_" I promptly interjected.

Peter saluted and then sighed.

"There are