child among an audience of children. Dancing it alone
she assumed the parts of the man and woman; advancing, retreating,
coquetting, rejecting, coyly bewitching, and at last yielding as lightly
and as immaterially as the flickering shadows that fell upon them from
the waving trees overhead. The master was fascinated yet troubled.
What if there had been older spectators? Would the parents take the
performance as innocently as the performer and her little audience? He
thought it necessary later to suggest this delicately to the child. Her
temper rose, her eyes flashed.

"Ah, the slipper, she is forbidden. The prayer book--she must not. The
dance, it is not good. Truly, there is nothing."

For several days she sulked. One morning she did not come to school,
nor the next. At the close of the third day the master called at the
Hoovers' ranch.

Mrs. Hoover met him embarrassedly in the hall. "I was sayin' to Hiram
he ought to tell ye, but he didn't like to till it was certain. Concha's
gone."

"Gone?" echoed the master.

"Yes. Run off with Pedro. Married to him yesterday by the Popish priest
at the mission."

"Married! That child?"

"She wasn't no child, Mr. Brooks. We were deceived. My brother was
a fool, and men don't understand these things. She was a grown
woman--accordin' to these folks' ways and ages--when she kem here. And
that's what bothered me."

There was a week's excitement at Chestnut Ridge, but it pleased the
master to know that while the children grieved for the loss of Concha
they never seemed to understand why she had gone.

DICK BOYLE'S BUSINESS CARD

The Sage Wood and Dead Flat stage coach was waiting before the station.
The Pine Barrens mail wagon that connected with it was long overdue,
with its transfer passengers, and the station had relapsed into listless
expectation. Even the humors of Dick Boyle, the Chicago "drummer,"--and,
so far, the solitary passenger--which had diverted the waiting loungers,
began to fail in effect, though the cheerfulness of the humorist was
unabated. The ostlers had slunk back into the stables, the station
keeper and stage driver had reduced their conversation to impatient
monosyllables, as if each thought the other responsible for the delay.
A solitary Indian, wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a
cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking
stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building
containing i