,
all the loose cattle around Brevoort will graze over me. Every fellow
for himself. We can't keep the golden rule. We'd never get rich if we
did."

"You are rich mans?" interrogated Francoise, focussing her curiosity on
that invisible power of wealth.

"Millionaires," brazenly claimed the young man, as he put an
earthen-ware pitcher on the table. "Set there, you thousand-dollar dish!
We don't have a yacht on the lake because we prefer small boats, and
we go out as guides to have fun with the greenhorns. The cooking at the
hotels is good enough for common hunters and fishermen who come here
from the cities to spend their money, but it isn't good enough for me.
You've come to the right place, you may make your mind easy on that."

Francoise smiled because he told her to make her mind easy, not because
she understood the irony of his poverty. To have secure shelter, and
such a table as he spread, and the prowess to achieve continual abundant
sustenance from the world, made wealth in her eyes. She was as happy as
Gougou when this strange family, gathered from three or four nations,
sat down to their first meal.

The sun went low like a scarlet eggy probing the mother-of-pearl lake
with a long red line of shadow, until it wasted into grayness and so
disappeared. Then home-returning sails became spiritualized, and moved
in mist as in a dream--foggy lake and sky, as one body, seeming to push
in upon the land.

Francoise slept the sleep of a healthy woman, with her child on her arm,
until at dawn the closed flap of the tent yielded to a bounding shape.
She opened her startled eyes to see Jim the blood-hound at the foot of
the bed, jerking the mosquito-netting. He growled at the interlopers,
not being able in his canine mind to reconcile their presence with his
customary duty of waking his masters in that tent. A call and a whistle
at the other side of the camp drew him away doubting. But in a day both
he and Jess had adopted the new members of the family and walked at
Gougou's heels.

Gougou existed in wonderland. He regarded the men as great and amiable
powers, who could do what they pleased with the elements and with the
creatures of the earth. They had a fawn, which had followed Brown home
along the beach, feeding on leaves from his hand. They had built it a
sylvan home of cedar boughs behind the camp, from which it wandered
at will. And though at first shy of Gougou, the pretty thing was soon
induced to stand upon