e I didn't want to. And I do wish you'd quit calling him that; he
has a real name, I believe."

"If you're looking for a scrap," grinned Jack, "I'll stake you to my six
gun, and you can go down and kill off a few of those claim-jumpers. You
seem to be in just about the proper frame uh mind to murder the whole
bunch. Fly at it!"

"It begins to look as if we women would have to do something," she
retorted cruelly. "There doesn't seem to be a man on the ranch with
spirit enough to stop them from digging up the whole--"

"I guess that'll be about enough," Jack interrupted her, coldly. "Why
didn't you say that to Good Indian?"

"I told you not to call him that. I don't see why everybody is so mean
to-day. There isn't a person--"

When Jack laughed, he shut his eyes until he looked through narrow
slits under heavy lashes, and showed some very nice teeth, and two deep
dimples besides the one which always stood in his chin. He laughed then,
for the first time that day, and if Evadna had been in a less vixenish
temper she would have laughed with him just as everyone else always did.
But instead of that, she began to cry again, which made Jack feel very
much a brute.

"Oh, come on and be good," he urged remorsefully. But Evadna turned and
ran back into the house and into her room, and cried luxuriously into
her pillow. Jack, peeping in at the window which opened upon the porch,
saw her there, huddled upon the bed.

In the spring-house his mother sat crying silently over her
helplessness, and failed to respond to his comforting pats upon the
shoulder. Donny struck at him viciously when Jack asked him an idle
question, and Charlie, the Indian with the tumor over his eye, scowled
from the corner of the house where he was squatting until someone
offered him fruit, or food, or tobacco. He was of an acquisitive nature,
was Charlie--and the road to his favor must be paved with gifts.

"This is what I call hell," Jack stated aloud, and went straight away to
the strawberry patch, took up his stand with his toes against Stanley's
corner stake, cursed him methodically until he had quite exhausted his
vocabulary, and put a period to his forceful remarks by shooting a neat,
round hole through Stanley's coffee-pot. And Jack was the mild one of
the family.

By the time he had succeeded in puncturing recklessly the frying-pan,
and also the battered pan in which Stanley no doubt meant to wash his
samples of soil, his good humor returne