ental, you know, and
somewhat strenuous in his feelings."

"Bound to be when he gets right down to the soil. He leaves convention
with the spring bed at borne. But you were wise in your choice of time
for leaving. You'll be out of the country before mosquito season, which
is a blessing your lack of experience will not permit you to appreciate."

"I suppose not. But tell me about yourself, about your life. What kind
of neighbors have you? Or have you any?"

While she queried she watched the girl grinding coffee in the corner of a
flower sack upon the hearthstone. With a steadiness and skill which
predicated nerves as primitive as the method, she crushed the imprisoned
berries with a heavy fragment of quartz. David Payne noted his visitor's
gaze, and the shadow of a smile drifted over his lips.

"I did have some," he replied. "Missourian chaps, and a couple of
Cornishmen, but they went down to Eldorado to work at wages for a
grubstake."

Mrs. Sayther cast a look of speculative regard upon the girl. "But of
course there are plenty of Indians about?"

"Every mother's son of them down to Dawson long ago. Not a native in the
whole country, barring Winapie here, and she's a Koyokuk lass,--comes
from a thousand miles or so down the river."

Mrs. Sayther felt suddenly faint; and though the smile of interest in no
wise waned, the face of the man seemed to draw away to a telescopic
distance, and the tiered logs of the cabin to whirl drunkenly about. But
she was bidden draw up to the table, and during the meal discovered time
and space in which to find herself. She talked little, and that
principally about the land and weather, while the man wandered off into a
long description of the difference between the shallow summer diggings of
the Lower Country and the deep winter diggings of the Upper Country.

"You do not ask why I came north?" she asked. "Surely you know." They
had moved back from the table, and David Payne had returned to his axe-
handle. "Did you get my letter?"

"A last one? No, I don't think so. Most probably it's trailing around
the Birch Creek Country or lying in some trader's shack on the Lower
River. The way they run the mails in here is shameful. No order, no
system, no--"

"Don't be wooden, Dave! Help me!" She spoke sharply now, with an
assumption of authority which rested upon the past. "Why don't you ask
me about myself? About those we knew in the old times? Have you no
lon