s not suspect that the
tormentor loves his victim.

My heart aches with his humiliation. His mother is my cook, not a
princess, as the boy's pride would have her. His father was one of the
most dangerous leaders of the Rocky Mountain outlaws, so there the lad
saw glory, and I don't blame him. But all the glamour was stripped away
when Jesse tricked O'Flynn and his gang into surrender, handed them over
to justice, and showed poor Billy his sordid heroes for what they really
were. His father has been hanged.

Remember that this ranch, ablaze with romance for me, is squalid
every-day routine for Billy, whose dreams are beyond the sky-line. He
imagines railways as we imagine dragons, and the Bloomsbury
boarding-house from which my sister wrote on her return from India is,
from his point of view, a place in the Arabian Nights. I read to him
Taddy's letter, about the new boarder from Selangor, who is down with
fever, the German waiter caught reading Colonel Boyce's manuscript on
protective color for howitzers, the tweeny's sailor father drowned at
sea, and the excitement in that humdrum house when Lady Blacktail
called. "Wish I'd had a shot," said Billy wistfully, his mind on the
black-tail, our local kind of deer. Perhaps he saw forest behind the
boarding-house. "In the old country," said he, "do the does call? Only
the buck calls here. Your folks is easy excited, anyways."

"Lady Blacktail," said I, "is a woman."

"What was she shouting about?"

"She just called--came to take tea, you know."

"Got no job of work?"

"Oh, but her husband, Sir Tom, was a very rich man. He left her
millions."

"Mother's first husband," said Billy, his mind running on widows, "had
lots of wealth. He kep' a seegar stand down-town near the Battery, and
had a brass band when they buried him. Mother came out West."

That night the lad had come from Hundred Mile House, with Jesse's
pack-train bearing a load of stores. There was a dress length, music for
my dear dumpy piano, spiced rolls of bacon, much needed flour and
groceries, and an orange kerchief for Billy. From his saddle wallets he
produced my crumpled letters and the weekly paper, a Vancouver rag.
Therein Jesse labors among tangles of provincial politics, I gloat over
the cooking recipes of America's nice cuisine, and spare maybe just a
sigh over the London letter. Billy's portion consists of blood-curdling
disasters and crimes, and the widow waits ravenous for her kindling, bed
s