lunge."

"'Do you think--that--would have mattered?'"

"'Well,' she said, 'we have driven over as we promised!'"

"Agatha held her hands up ... as the man leaned down, and the next
moment she was strongly lifted."

"'I guess I needn't tell you where that is,' he said, and pointed to
the parallel of latitude that ran across."

"It seemed that he did not immediately notice her."

"'Are these things very much too big for you, Sally?'"

"It shambled forward in a curious manner."

"'I thought you might save Gregory, if I told you.'"

"'I was waiting for you,' she said simply."

HAWTREY'S DEPUTY.

CHAPTER I.

SALLY CREIGHTON.

The frost outside was bitter, and the prairie, which rolled back from
Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath
the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn.
It stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail
that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two
wavy ribands that melted into a waste of snow. Lander's consisted then
of five or six frame houses and stores, a hotel of the same material,
several sod stables, and a few birch-log barns; and its inhabitants
considered it one of the most promising places in Western Canada.
That, however, is the land of promise, a promise that is in due time
usually fulfilled, and the men of Lander's were, for the most part,
shrewdly practical optimists. They made the most of a somewhat grim
and frugal present, and staked all they had to give--the few dollars
they had brought in with them, and their powers of enduring toil--upon
the roseate future.

Stukely had given them, and their scattered neighbours, who had driven
there across several leagues of prairie, a supper in his barn, and a
big rusty stove, which had been brought in for the occasion, stood in
the midst of it. Its pipe glowed in places a dull red, and Stukely now
and then wondered uneasily whether it was charring a larger hole
through the shingles of the roof. On one side of the stove the floor
had been cleared; on the other benches, empty barrels, and tables were
huddled together, and such of the guests as were not at the moment
dancing sat upon them indiscriminately. A keg of hard Ontario cider
had been provided for their refreshment, and it was open to anybody to
ladle up what he wanted with a tin dipper, while a haze of tobacco
smoke drifted in thin blue wisps beneath the big