ss the threshold to restrain it.

"Is this Johnson's house?"

My remark was really addressed to the eldest, a boy of apparently nine
or ten, but I felt that my attention was unduly fascinated by the baby,
who at that moment had toppled over the bar, and was calmly eyeing
me upside down, while silently and heroically suffocating in its
petticoats. The boy disappeared without replying, but presently returned
with a taller girl of fourteen or fifteen. I was struck with the way
that, as she reached the door, she passed her hands rapidly over the
heads of the others as if counting them, picked up the baby, reversed
it, shook out its clothes, and returned it to the inside, without even
looking at it. The act was evidently automatic and habitual.

I repeated my question timidly.

Yes, it WAS Johnson's, but he had just gone to King's Mills. I replied,
hurriedly, that I knew it,--that I had met him beyond the canyon. As I
had lost my way and couldn't get to Sonora to-night, he had been good
enough to say that I might stay there until morning. My voice was
slightly raised for the benefit of Mr. Johnson's "old woman," who, I had
no doubt, was inspecting me furtively from some corner.

The girl drew the children away, except the boy. To him she said
simply, "Show the stranger whar to stake out his mule, 'Dolphus," and
disappeared in the "extension" without another word. I followed my
little guide, who was perhaps more actively curious, but equally
unresponsive. To my various questions he simply returned a smile of
exasperating vacuity. But he never took his eager eyes from me, and I
was satisfied that not a detail of my appearance escaped him. Leading
the way behind the house to a little wood, whose only "clearing"
had been effected by decay or storm, he stood silently apart while
I picketed Chu Chu, neither offering to assist me nor opposing any
interruption to my survey of the locality. There was no trace of human
cultivation in the surroundings of the cabin; the wilderness still trod
sharply on the heels of the pioneer's fresh footprints, and even seemed
to obliterate them. For a few yards around the actual dwelling there
was an unsavory fringe of civilization in the shape of cast-off clothes,
empty bottles, and tin cans, and the adjacent thorn and elder bushes
blossomed unwholesomely with bits of torn white paper and bleaching
dish-cloths. This hideous circle never widened; Nature always appeared
to roll back the intruding