o be feared that all record of the poor bear will soon be lost.

III.

JAKE STANWOOD'S GAL.

Jacob Stanwood was not the only college-bred man, stranded more or less
like a disabled hull, upon the prairie sea of Colorado. Within the
radius of a hundred miles--no great distance as prairie miles are
reckoned,--there were known to be some half dozen of the fraternity,
putting their superior equipment to the test, opposing trained minds and
muscles to the stubborn resistance of an ungenial nature. The varying
result of the struggle in different cases would seem to indicate that it
is moral fibre which nature respects and submits to, rather than any
acquired advantages.

[Illustration: "BETWEEN HIS CABIN DOOR AND 'THE RANGE' STRETCHED TWENTY
MILES OF ARID PRAIRIE."]

In Jacob Stanwood's case there was no such test applied, for there was
absolutely no struggle. He would have found it much easier to send a
bullet through his brain than to put that organ to any violent exertion.
Up to him, but he sometimes fancied that he saw it coming. At such times
he would philosophize over himself and fate, until he had exhausted
those two great subjects, and then, in a quiet and gentlemanly way, he
would drown speculation in the traditional dram. He never drank anything
but "Old Rye," and he flattered himself that he did so only when he
pleased. If he somewhat misapprehended his relation with old rye, it was
perhaps no wonder; for in his semi-occasional encounters with this
gentlemanly intoxicant, his only witnesses and commentators were his
collie dogs, and they never ventured upon an opinion in the matter.

When he was in a good mood Stanwood would sit in his doorway of a summer
evening, with the collies at his feet, and commune with nature as
amicably as if she had been his best friend. Between his cabin door and
"the range" stretched twenty miles of arid prairie; but when the sun was
in the west, the wide expanse took on all the mystic hues that the
Orientals love and seek to imitate, and he gazed across it to the
towering peaks with a sense of ownership which no paternal acres, no
velvet lawns, nor stately trees, could have awakened in him. A row of
telegraph-poles, which had doubtless once been trees, straggled along
the line of the railroad, a few miles to the north, and his own windmill
indicated the presence of water underground. But as far as the eye could
reach not a living tree could be seen, not a glimmer of a lak