anger tuk up?" he asked.

Peters looked at him, hardly comprehending his tremor of excitement.
"Seems sorter sizable," he replied, sibilantly, sucking his pipe-stem.

Todd nodded meditatively several times, leaning his elbows on his knees,
his eyes fixed on the landscape. "Hev she got enny particular marks, ez
ye knows on?" he drawled.

"Wa'al, she be ez black ez a crow, with the nigh fore-foot white. An'
she hev got a white star spang in the middle o' her forehead, an' the
left side o' her nose is white too."

Todd rose suddenly to his feet. "By gum!" he cried, with a burst of
passion, "she air _my_ filly! An' 'twar that thar durned horse-thief of
a ranger ez tolled her off!"

*****

Deep among the wooded spurs Lonesome Cove nestles, sequestered from the
world. Naught emigrates thence except an importunate stream that forces
its way through a rocky gap, and so to freedom beyond. No stranger
intrudes; only the moon looks in once in a while. The roaming wind may
explore its solitudes; and it is but the vertical sunbeams that strike
to the heart of the little basin, because of the massive mountains that
wall it round and serve to isolate it. So nearly do they meet at the gap
that one great assertive crag, beetling far above, intercepts the view
of the wide landscape beyond, leaving its substituted profile jaggedly
serrating the changing sky. Above it, when the weather is fair, appear
vague blue lines, distant mountain summits, cloud strata, visions. Below
its jutting verge may be caught glimpses of the widening valley without.
But pre-eminent, gaunt, sombre, it sternly dominates "Lonesome," and is
the salient feature of the little world it limits.

Tobe Gryce's house, gray, weather-beaten, moss-grown, had in comparison
an ephemeral, modern aspect. For a hundred years its inmates had come
and gone and lived and died. They took no heed of the crag, but never
a sound was lost upon it. Their drawling iterative speech the iterative
echoes conned. The ringing blast of a horn set astir some phantom chase
in the air. When the cows came lowing home, there were lowing herds
in viewless company. Even if one of the children sat on a rotting log
crooning a vague, fragmentary ditty, some faint-voiced spirit in the
rock would sing. Lonesome Cove?--home of invisible throngs!

As the ranger trotted down the winding road, multitudinous hoof-beats,
as of a troop of cavalry, heralded his approach to the little girl who
stood on the