"A lovely woman doesn't woo, she is
wooed!"

"What are you looking for, perfection in rhetorical figure? This is
extemporaneous."

"But it won't do!"

"And asks to be conquered," suggested Whispering Smith.

"Asks! Oh, scandalous, Mr. Smith!"

"It is easy to see why _he_ never could get any one to marry him,"
declared McCloud over the bacon.

"Hold on, then! Like lovely woman, it does not seek us, we seek it,"
persisted the orator, "_That_ at least is so, isn't it?"

"It is better," assented Marion.

"And it waits to be conquered. How is that?"

Marion turned to Dicksie. "You are not helping a bit. What do you
think?"

"I don't think woman and trouble ought to be associated even in
figure; and I think 'waits' is horrid," and Dicksie looked gravely at
Whispering Smith.

McCloud, too, looked at him. "You're in trouble now yourself."

"And I brought it on myself. So we do seek it, don't we? And trouble,
I must hold, _is_ like woman. 'Waits' I strike out as unpleasantly
suggestive; let it go. So, then, trouble is like a lovely woman,
loveliest _when_ conquered. Now, Miss Dunning, if you have a spark of
human kindness you won't turn me down on that proposition. By the way,
I have something put down about trouble."

He was laughing. Dicksie asked herself if this could be the man about
whom floated so many accusations of coldness and cruelty and death. He
drew a note-book from a waistcoat pocket.

"Oh, it's in the note-book! There comes the black note-book,"
exclaimed McCloud.

"Don't make fun of my note-book!"

"I shouldn't dare." McCloud pointed to it as he spoke to Dicksie. "You
should see what is in that note-book: the record, I suppose, of every
man in the mountains and of a great many outside."

"And countless other things," added Marion.

"Such as what?" asked Dicksie.

"Such as you, for example," said Marion.

"Am I a thing?"

"A sweet thing, of course," said Marion ironically. "Yes, you; with
color of eyes, hair, length of index finger of the right hand,
curvature of thumb, disposition--whether peaceable or otherwise, and
prison record, if any."

"And number of your watch," added McCloud.

"How dreadful!"

Whispering Smith eyed Dicksie benignly. "They are talking this
nonsense to distract us, of course, but I am bound to read you what I
have here, if you will graciously submit."

"Submit? I _wait_ to hear it," laughed Dicksie.

"My training in prosody is the slightest, as will appe