ss of his own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that
he was joking. When he had made his peace they fell into talk again,
Lance becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts
concerning her life which did not immediately affect him. Her mother
had died on the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run
away from home at twelve. She fully expected to see him again, and
thought he might sometime stray into their canon. "That is why, then,
you take so much stock in tramps," said Lance.

You expect to recognize _him_?"

"Well," replied Flip, gravely, "there is suthing in _that_, and there's
suthing in _this_: some o' these chaps might run across brother and do
him a good turn for the sake of me."

"Like me, for instance?" suggested Lance.

"Like you. You'd do him a good turn, wouldn't you?"

"You bet!" said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him;
"only don't you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously." He was
half conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any
of her _proteges_ had ever returned.

"No," said Flip, "no one ever did. It shows," she added with sublime
simplicity, "I had done 'em good, and they could get on alone. Don't
it?"

"It does," responded Lance grimly. "Have you any other friends that
come?"

"Only the Postmaster at the Crossing."

"The Postmaster?"

"Yes: he's reckonin' to marry me next year, if I'm big enough."

"And what do you reckon?" asked Lance earnestly.

Flip began a series of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead,
picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at
Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of
everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said:

"That's telling."

They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
"Look," said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their path, which
seemed, however, to lose itself in the underbrush a dozen yards away,
"ther's your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further you get on,
but you must use your eyes here, and get to know it well afore you get
into the fog. Good-by."

"Good-by." Lance took her hand and drew her beside him. She was still
redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to the young man's excited
fancy seemed at that moment to personify the perfume and intoxication
of her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly, he tried to kiss
her: she struggled for some time strongl