calm."

Trefethan broke off abruptly.

"You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since
dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side by side with
my sacred youth. It is not I--'old' Trefethan--that talks; it is my
youth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes
I have ever seen--so very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very
curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about her,
you may know better for yourselves."

"She did not stand up. But she put out her hand."

"'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'

"I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech.
Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman, but that tang!
It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the last
boundary of the world--but the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was like
the stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was a
poet. You shall see."

"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her
orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief. She told the
bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they
did, too. And they knew enough not to get away with as much as a
moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,
and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those little
thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a white woman
out there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other
side of No Man's Land.

"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that ever
set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell, and then we'll have
a bite to eat. Which way might you be comin'?'

"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I
want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge
of that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful
woman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other
man's book.

"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit
me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me across
the best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched
apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of
Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And