s indeed it was; for it was a
pardon signed by Governor Barker. "And the Governor has let me carry
it to Nate myself. He won't know a thing about it till I tell him. The
Governor was real kind, and we will never forget him. I reckon Nate must
have a mustache by now?" said she to Lin.

"Yes," Lin answered, gruffly, looking away from her, "he has got a
mustache all right."

"He'll be glad to see you," said I, for something to say.

"Of course he will! How many hours did you say we will be?" she asked
Lin, turning from me again, for Mr. McLean had not been losing time. It
was plain that between these two had arisen a freemasonry from which I
was already shut out. Her woman's heart had answered his right impulse
to tell her about her brother, and I had been found wanting!

So now she listened over again to the hours of stage jolting that
"we" had before us, and that lay between her and Nate. "We would be
four--herself, Lin, myself, and the boy Billy." Was Billy the one at
supper? Oh no; just Billy Lusk, of Laramie. "He's a kid I'm taking up
the country," Lin explained. "Ain't you most tuckered out?"

"Oh, me!" she confessed, with a laugh and a sigh.

There again! She had put aside my solicitude lightly, but was willing
Lin should know her fatigue. Yet, fatigue and all, she would not sleep
in the agent's room. At sight of it and the close quarters she drew back
into the outer office, so prompted by that inner, unsuspected strictness
she had shown me before.

"Come out!" she cried, laughing. "Indeed, I thank you. But I can't have
you sleep on this hard floor out here. No politeness, now! Thank you
ever so much. I'm used to roughing it pretty near as well as if I was--a
cowboy!" And she glanced at Lin. "They're calling forty-seven," she
added to the agent.

"That's me," he said, coming out to the telegraph instrument. "So you're
one of us?"

"I didn't know forty-seven meant Separ," said I. "How in the world do
you know that?"

"I didn't. I heard forty-seven, forty-seven, forty-seven, start and go
right along, so I guessed they wanted him, and he couldn't hear them
from his room."

"Can yu' do astronomy and Spanish too?" inquired the proud and smiling
McLean.

"Why, it's nothing! I've been day operator back home. Why is a deputy
coming through on a special engine?"

"Please don't say it out loud!" quavered the agent, as the machine
clicked its news.

"Yu' needn't be scared of a girl," said Lin. "Another sheri