oyousness, a
glow and breeziness, which completely fascinated Babcock. Although she
had been up half the night, she was as sweet and fresh and rosy as a
child. Her vitality, her strength, her indomitable energy, impressed him
as no woman's had ever done before.

When she had finished her story she suddenly caught Patsy out of her
father's arms and dropped with him into a chair, all the mother-hunger
in her still unsatisfied. She smothered him with kisses and hugged him
to her breast, holding his pinched face against her ruddy cheek. Then
she smoothed his forehead with her well-shaped hand, and rocked him back
and forth. By and by she told him of the stone that the Big Gray had got
in his hoof down at the fort that morning, and how lame he had been, and
how Cully had taken it out with--a--great--big--spike!--dwelling on the
last words as if they belonged to some wonderful fairy-tale. The little
fellow sat up in her lap and laughed as he patted her breast joyously
with his thin hand. "Cully could do it," he shouted in high glee; "Cully
can do anything." Babcock, apparently, made no more difference to her
than if he had been an extra chair.

As she moved about her rooms afterward, calling to her men from the open
door, consulting with Jennie, her arms about her neck, or stopping
at intervals to croon over her child, she seemed to him to lose all
identity with the woman on the dock. The spirit that enveloped her
belonged rather to that of some royal dame of heroic times, than to that
of a working woman of to-day. The room somehow became her castle, the
rough stablemen her knights.

On his return to his work she walked back with him part of the way.
Babcock, still bewildered, and still consumed with curiosity to learn
something of her past, led the talk to her life along the docks,
expressing his great surprise at discovering her so capable and willing
to do a man's work, asking who had taught her, and whether her husband
in his time had been equally efficient and strong.

Instantly she grew reticent. She did not even answer his question. He
waited a moment, and, realizing his mistake, turned the conversation in
another direction.

"And how about those rough fellows around the wharves--those who don't
know you--are they never coarse and brutal to you?"

"Not when I look 'em in the face," she answered slowly and deliberately.
"No man ever opens his head, nor dar'sn't. When they see me a-comin'
they stops talkin', if it