icity and frontier hilarity. The millinery store stood
next to the corner of Fort Street. The lot lay in an "L," and at
the rear of the store the first owner had built a small connecting
cottage to live in. This faced on Fort Street, so that Marion had
her shop and living-rooms communicating, and yet apart. The store
building is still pointed out as the former shop of Marion Sinclair,
where George McCloud boarded when the Crawling Stone Line was built,
where Whispering Smith might often have been seen, where Sinclair
himself was last seen alive in Medicine Bend, where Dicksie
Dunning's horse dragged her senseless one wild mountain night, and
where, indeed, for a time the affairs of the whole mountain division
seemed to tangle in very hard knots.

As to the millinery business, it was never, after Marion bought the
shop, more than moderately successful. The demand that existed in
Medicine Bend for red hats of the picture sort Marion declined to
recognize. For customers who sought these she turned out hats of
sombre coloring calculated to inspire gloom rather than revelry, and
she naturally failed to hold what might be termed the miscellaneous
business. But after Dicksie Dunning of the Stone Ranch, fresh from the
convent, rode into the shop, or if not into it nearly so, and, gliding
through the door, ordered a hat out of hand, Marion always had some
business. All Medicine Bend knew Dicksie Dunning, who dressed
stunningly, rode famously, and was so winningly democratic that half
the town never called her anything, at a distance, but Dicksie.

The first hat was a small affair but haughty. The materials were
unheard of in Marion's stock and had to be sent for. Marion's
arrangements with the jobbing houses always had a C. O. D. complexion;
the jobbers maintained that this saved book-keeping, and Marion, who
of course never knew any better, paid the double express charges like
a lamb. She acted, too, as banker for the other impecunious
tradespeople in the block, and as this included nearly all of them she
was often pressed for funds herself. McCloud undertook sometimes to
intervene and straighten out her millinery affairs. One evening he
went so far as to attempt an inventory of her stock and some schedule
of her accounts; but Marion, with the front-shop curtains closely
drawn and McCloud perspiring on a step-ladder, inspecting boxes of
feathers and asking stern questions, would look so pathetically sweet
and helpless when sh