't know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I
guess it burned!"

"You guess it burned!"

"Well, it ain't there, you know."

"But if it burned the ashes are there."

"All right, girlie, they're there then. Now let's have tea."

This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening,
but that didn't keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and
stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to
the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the
little house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger's
back--Ginger being her own yellow broncho--and set off at a hard pace
for the house. It didn't appear to come any nearer, but the objects
which had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Flora
pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approached
the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the little
shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her
eyes.

She slapped Ginger's flanks and kept him going, and she at last got him
up to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall
and rank and in the midst of it lay a baby's shoe. Flora thought of
picking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she
grew angry, and set Ginger's head toward the place and tried to drive
him over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered
himself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home
as only a broncho can.

STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE

VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys
his work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of the
picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, in
Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe
through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no
dreamer. He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a
winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day
and not worry about it to-morrow.

Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.

"The world," Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him
when he smokes his pipe, "was created in six days to be photographed.
Man--and particularly woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds
are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade. They have been
created in order to give the camera obscura something t