h bedstead had been displaced for a small wrought-iron
ascetic-looking couch covered with a gorgeously striped Mexican blanket.
The fireplace had been dismantled of its steel grate, and the hearth
extended so as to allow a pile of symmetrically heaped moss-covered
hickory logs to take its place. The walls were covered with trophies
of the chase, buck-horns and deer-heads, and a number of Indian arrows
stood in a sheaf in the corners beside a few modern guns and rifles.

"Perfectly lovely," said Marie, "but"--with a slight shiver of her
expressive shoulders--"a little cold and outdoorish, eh?"

"Nonsense," returned Kitty dictatorially, "and if he IS cold, he can
easily light those logs. They always build their open fires under a
tree. Why, even Mr. Gunn used to do that when he was camping out in
the Adirondacks last summer. I call it perfectly comfortable and SO
natural." Nevertheless, they had both tucked their chilly hands under
the fleecy shawls they had snatched from the hall for this hyperborean
expedition.

"You have taken much pains for him, Kaitee," said Marie, with her
faintest foreign intonation. "You will like this strange uncle--you?"

"He is a wonderful man, Marie; he's been everywhere, seen everything,
and done everything out there. He's fought duels, been captured by
Indians and tied to a stake to be tortured. He's been leader of a
Vigilance Committee, and they say that he has often shot and killed men
himself. I'm afraid he's been rather wicked, you know. He's lived alone
in the woods like a hermit without seeing a soul, and then, again, he's
been a chief among the Indians, with Heaven knows how many Indian wives!
They called him 'The Pale-faced Thunderbolt,' my dear, and 'The Young
Man who Swallows the Lightning,' or something like that."

"And what can he want here?" asked Marie.

"To see us, my dear," said Kitty loftily; "and then, too, he has to
settle something about HIS share of the property; for you know grandpa
left a share of it to him. Not that he's ever bothered himself about it,
for he's rich,--a kind of Monte Cristo, you know,--with a gold mine and
an island off the coast, to say nothing of a whole county that he owns,
that is called after him, and millions of wild cattle that he rides
among and lassos! It's dreadfully hard to do. You know you take a long
rope with a slipknot, and you throw it around your head so, and"--

"Hark!" said Marie, with a dramatic start, and her finger on her