is very kind."

"Never!" said the old lady again. "When I die, you'll have
something--and that will not be long now."

Molly flung her arms around her aunt, and stopped her words with a kiss.
And then one winter afternoon, two years later, came the last straw.

The front door of the old house had shut. Out of it had stepped the
persistent suitor. Mrs. Flynt watched him drive away in his smart
sleigh.

"That girl is a fool!" she said furiously; and she came away from her
bedroom window where she had posted herself for observation.

Inside the old house a door had also shut. This was the door of Molly's
own room. And there she sat, in floods of tears. For she could not bear
to hurt a man who loved her with all the power of love that was in him.

It was about twilight when her door opened, and an elderly lady came
softly in.

"My dear," she ventured, "and you were not able--"

"Oh, mother!" cried the girl, "have you come to say that too?"

The next day Miss Wood had become very hard. In three weeks she
had accepted the position on Bear Creek. In two months she started,
heart-heavy, but with a spirit craving the unknown.

IX. THE SPINSTER MEETS THE UNKNOWN

On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail
from Sunk Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range.
Spring was backward, and they, as they rode galloping and gathering
upon the cold week's work, cursed cheerily and occasionally sang. The
Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he kept
a song going--a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were
quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cowpunchers monstrously.
They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and
awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after
a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice
and begin:

"If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl,
I'll tell you what I'll do:
I'll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND
I'll shoot you with my pistol, too--"

then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going
three, four, ten times, and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.

By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the
promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed
and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a
neighborhood, and it brou