ant Indian encampment? She shut the
thought from her mind, at present, and turned her attention to the work
of making camp.

With entire good humor she began to gather such pieces of dead wood as
she could find for their fire.

"Your prisoner might as well make herself useful," she said.

Ben's face lighted as she had not seen it since their outward journey
from Snowy Gulch. "Thank God you're taking it that way, Beatrice," he
told her fervently. "It was a proposition I couldn't help--"

But the girl's eyes flashed, and her lips set in a hard line. "I'm doing
it to make my own time go faster," she told him softly, rather slowly.
"I want you to remember that."

But instantly both forgot their words to listen to a familiar clucking
sound from a near-by shrub. Peering closely they made out the plump,
genial form of Franklin's grouse,--a bird known far and wide in the
north for her ample breast and her tender flesh.

"Good Lord, there's supper!" Ben whispered. "Beatrice, get your
pistol--"

Her eyes smiled as she looked him in the face. "You remember--my pistol
isn't loaded!"

"Excuse me. I forgot. Give it to me."

She handed him the little gun, and he slipped in the shells he had taken
from it. Then--for the simple and sensible reason that he didn't want to
take any chance on the loss of their dinner--he stole within twenty feet
of the bird. Very carefully he drew down on the plump neck.

"Dinner all safe," he remarked rather gayly, as the grouse came tumbling
through the branches.

XXIV

Quietly Beatrice retrieved the bird and began to remove its feathers.
Ben built the fire, chopped sturdily at a half-grown spruce until it
shattered to the earth, and then chopped it into lengths for fuel. When
the fire was blazing bright, he cut away the green branches and laid
them, stems overlapping, into a fragrant bed.

"Here's where you sleep to-night, Beatrice," he informed her.

She stopped in her work long enough to try the springy boughs with her
arms; then she gave him an answering smile. Even a tenderfoot can make
some sort of a comfortable pallet out of evergreen boughs--ends
overlapping and plumes bent--but a master woodsman can fashion a
veritable cradle, soft as silk with never a hard limb to irritate the
flesh, and yielding as a hair mattress. Such softness, with the
fragrance of the balsam like a sleeping potion, can not help but bring
sweet dreams.

Ben had been wholly deliberate in the care wit