clusters of bullberries, then turning red.

Dr. Slavens and William Bentley tried for fish, with a total catch
between them of one small trout, which was carried in triumph to the
place picked upon by Smith for the noonday camp. Smith would not trust
the coffee to any hand but his own, and he blackened up the pot
shamefully, Mrs. Reed declared.

But what did Smith care for the criticism of Mrs. Reed when he was
making coffee for Agnes? What did he care, indeed, for the judgment of
the whole world when he was laying out his best efforts to please the
finest woman who ever sat beside him on the box, and one for whom he was
ready to go any distance, and do any endeavors, to save her from being
made a sucker of and taken in and skinned?

It was pleasant there by the river; so pleasant that there was not one
of them but voted Wyoming the finest and most congenial spot in the
world, with the kindest skies, the softest summer winds, and the one
place of all places for a home.

"Yes," Smith remarked, tossing pebbles into the river from the place
where he sat cross-legged on the ground with his pipe, "it takes a hold
of you that way. It goes to twenty below in the winter, sometimes, and
the wind blows like the plug had popped out of the North Pole, and the
snow covers up the sheep on the range and smothers 'em, and you lose all
you got down to the last chaw of t'backer. But you stick, some way, and
you forgit you ever had a home back in Indiana, where strawberries
grow."

"Why, don't they grow here?" asked the miller's wife, holding a bunch of
red bullberries caressingly against her cheek.

"I ain't seen a natural strawberry in fourteen years," said Smith, more
proud than regretful, as if such a long abstinence were a virtue.

"Natural?" repeated Mrs. Reed. "Surely you don't mean that they
manufacture them here?"

"They send 'em here in cans," explained Smith, "pale, with sour water on
'em, no more like real, ma'am, than a cigarette's like a smoke."

The men with pipes chuckled their appreciation of the comparison. Horace
Bentley, with a fresh cigarette--which he had taken out of a silver
case--in his fingers, turned it, quizzically smiling as he struck a
match.

"It's an imitation," said he; "but it's good enough for me."

The sun was slanting near the rough hills beyond the river when they
started back to Comanche.

"You've seen the best of the reservation," explained Smith, "and they
ain't no earthly use in see