we kill and cook our dinner. He doesn't know anything about real
comfort; he wants too many cushions."

The man she called Max bent his head and whispered something to her, at
which her face flushed just a little and a tiny wrinkle crept between her
straight, beautiful brows.

"I told you not to say pretty things that way, just because you think
girls like to hear them. I don't. Maybe I will when I get civilized; but
Mr. Haydon thinks that is a long ways ahead, doesn't he?" The wrinkle was
gone--vanished in a quizzical smile, as she looked up into the very
handsome face of the young fellow.

"So do I," he acknowledged. "I have a strong desire, especially when you
snub me, to be the man to take you on a lone trail like that. I will, too,
some day."

"Maybe you will," she agreed. "But I feel sorry for you beforehand."

She seemed a tantalizing specimen of girlhood, as she stood there, a
slight, brown slip of a thing, dressed in a plain flannel suit, the color
of her golden-brown short curls. In her brown cloth hat the wings of a
redbird gleamed--the feathers and her lips having all there was of bright
color about her; for her face was singularly colorless for so young a
girl. The creamy skin suggested a pale-tinted blossom, but not a fragile
one; and the eyes--full eyes of wine-brown--looked out with frank daring
on the world.

But for all the daring brightness of her glances, it was not a joyous
face, such as one would wish a girl of seventeen to possess. A little
cynical curve of the red mouth, a little contemptuous glance from those
brown eyes, showed one that she took her measurements of individuals by a
gauge of her own, and that she had not that guileless trust in human
nature that is supposed to belong to young womanhood. The full expression
indicated an independence that seemed a breath caught from the wild beauty
of those Northern hills.

Her gaze rested lightly on the two strangers and their trophies of the
chase, on the careless ferryman, and the few stragglers from the ranch and
the cabins. These last had gathered there to view the train and its people
as they passed, for the ties on which the iron rails rested were still of
green wood, and the iron engines of transportation were recent additions
to those lands of the far North, and were yet a novelty.

Over the faces of the white men her eyes passed carelessly. She did not
seem much interested in civilized men, even though decked in finer raiment
tha