visits eagerly. To Jim he could utter himself
freely. They had known each other so long, and he believed he understood
his partner to the centre of his heart.

He usually had supper ready--often he had help from the girls or Mrs.
Burke, and while a dozen hands volunteered at the team and with the
mail-bag, Rivers was free to hurry to his table, whereat he fared like a
pasha attended by the flower of his harem. The girls pretended it was
all on account of his office as mail-carrier, but they deceived no one,
much less an experienced beau like Rivers. He accepted it all with
shameless egotism.

To Bailey's mind Jim was too well attended. He seemed to see less and
less of his partner as the season wore on. They seldom sat down to talk
in the good old fashion, wearing out half the night smoking, listening
to the slumber-song of the night plain, for Rivers got into the habit of
walking home with some of the girls after the mail was distributed,
leaving his partner to do the trading. Sometimes he went away with Mrs.
Burke, if she were alone; sometimes with Estelle Clayton, whom Bailey
thought the finest woman in the world. He secretly resented Rivers'
attention to Estelle, for he had come to look upon her as under his
protection. Her coming raised mail-days to the level of a national
holiday.

She scared him, and yet he rejoiced to see her coming down over the sod
so strong, so erect, so clear-eyed. She wore her hair like a matron, and
that pleased him, and she looked at him so frankly and unwaveringly. She
had been a school-teacher in some middle Western State, and had been
swept into this movement by her desire to go to an Eastern college.

Bailey contrived to look very stern and very busy whenever she came in,
but she was wise in ways of men, and treated him as if he were a good
comrade, and so gradually he came to talk to her almost as freely as
with Blanche Burke.

He did not know that Jim almost invariably went over to Burke's
shanty--even when he walked home with Miss Clayton. Rivers did not
impress Estelle favorably. She was not one to be moved by flattery, nor
by dimples in male cheeks. She accepted his company pleasantly, but
there were well-defined bounds to her friendship, as Rivers discovered
one evening as they were walking over the plain toward her home.

On every side the vivid green stretched away, smooth as the rounded
flesh of a woman, velvet in texture, glorified by the saffron and orange
of the su