vehicle pulled out of
the hanging dust in the distance, the solitary driver could be seen
urging on his team. In a few moments more they had halted at the lower
end of the station.

"Wonder what's up!" said the mail agent.

"Nothin'! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens," said one of the
ostlers. "Injins doin' ghost dancin'--or suthin like that--and the
passengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar's only
one ez dar come--and she's a lady."

"A lady?" echoed Boyle.

"Yes," answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall,
graceful girl who, waiving the gallant assistance of the station keeper,
had leaped unaided from the vehicle. "A lady--and the fort commandant's
darter at that! She's clar grit, you bet--a chip o' the old block. And
all this means, sonny, that you're to give up that box seat to HER. Miss
Julia Cantire don't take anythin' less when I'm around."

The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards
the waiting coach--erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and
clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with
the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline
nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with
an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled
eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be
charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck
and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have
evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE
appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over--he was rather
short; through him--he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested
with a frank recognition on the driver.

"Good-morning, Mr. Foster," she said, with a smile.

"Mornin', miss. I hear they're havin' an Injin scare over at the
Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein' stumped by a
lady!"

"I don't think they believed I would go, and some of them had their
wives with them," returned the young lady indifferently; "besides,
they are Eastern people, who don't know Indians as well as WE do, Mr.
Foster."

The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. "Yes, ma'am," he
laughed, "I reckon the sight of even old 'Fleas in the Blanket' over
there," pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the
station, "would frighten 'em out o' their boots. And yet