uty of
caring for them, loving them, and teaching them right. A child can't owe a
debt of duty when it never received the duties it should have first. Oh, I
may not say this clearly as I feel it."

"But you know, 'Tana," said Miss Slocum, "that if there is no commandment
as to parents giving care to their children, it is only because it is so
plainly a natural thing to do that it was unnecessary to command it."

"No more natural than for a child to honor any person who is honorable, or
to love the parent who loves him, and teaches him rightly. Huh! If a child
is not able to love and respect a parent, it is the child who loses the
most."

Miss Slocum looked at her sadly.

"I can't scold you as I would try to scold many a one in your place," she
said, "for I feel as if you must have traveled over some long, hard path
of troubles, before you could reach this feeling you have. But, 'Tana,
think of brighter things; young girls should never drift into those
perplexing questions. They will make you melancholy if you brood on such
things."

"Melancholy? Well, I think not," and she smiled and shrugged her
shoulders. "Seems to me I'm the least gloomy person in camp this morning.
All the rest of you look as though Mr. Holly had been your bosom friend."

She talked recklessly--they thought heartlessly--of the murder, and the
two women were strongly inclined to think the shock of the affair had
touched her brain, for she showed no concern whatever as to her own
position, but treated it as a joke. And when she realized that she was to
a certain extent under guard, she seemed to find amusement in that, too.
Her expressions, when the cousins grew pitiful over the handsome face of
Holly, were touched with ridicule.

"I wonder if there was ever a man too low and vile to get woman's pity, if
he only had a pretty face," she said, caustically. "If he was an ugly,
old, half-decent fellow, you wouldn't be making any soft-hearted surmises
as to what he might have been under different circumstances. He has
spoiled the lives of several tenderhearted women like you--yet you pity
him!"

"'Tana, I never knew you to be so set against any one as you are against
that poor dead man," declared Mrs. Huzzard. "Not so much wonder the folks
think you know how it happened, for you always had a helping word for
the worst old tramp or beggarly Indian that came around; but for this man
you have nothing but unkindness."

"No," agreed the girl, "and yo