re fit for a king's supper. And after
supper strange men loafed up in the dim delicious twilight, with the
little news of the day--how a heifer had "gone strayed" from
Nicholson's; how the widow at Grant's Fork wouldn't part with a little
hayland nohow, though "she's an' her big brothers can't manage more than
ha-af their land now. She's so darned proud." Diana of the Crossways
entertained them in queenly wise, and her husband and Yankee Jim bade
them sit right down and make themselves at home. Then did Yankee Jim
uncurl his choicest lies on Indian warfare aforetime; then did the
whisky-flask circle round the little crowd; then did Diana's husband
'low that he was quite handy with the lariat, but had seen men rope a
steer by any foot or horn indicated; then did Diana unburden herself
about her neighbours. The nearest house was three miles away, "but the
women aren't nice, neighbourly folk. They talk so. They haven't got
anything else to do seemingly. If a woman goes to a dance and has a good
time, they talk, and if she wears a silk dress, they want to know how
jest ranchin' folks--folk on a ranche--come by such things; and they
make mischief down all the lands here from Gardiner City way back up to
Livingstone. They're mostly Montanna raised, and they haven't been
nowheres. Ah, how they talk!" "Were things like this," demanded Diana,
"in the big world outside, whence I had come?" "Yes," I said, "things
were very much the same all over the world," and I thought of a far-away
station in India where new dresses and the having of good times at
dances raised cackle more grammatical perhaps, but no less venomous than
the gossip of the "Montanna-raised" folk on the ranches of the
Yellowstone.

Next morn I fished again and listened to Diana telling the story of her
life. I forget what she told me, but I am distinctly aware that she had
royal eyes and a mouth that the daughter of a hundred earls might have
envied--so small and so delicately cut it was. "An' you come back an'
see us again," said the simple-minded folk. "Come back an' we'll show
you how to catch six-pound trout at the head of the canyon."

To-day I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I wish I were dead. The train
halted at Cinnabar station, and we were decanted, a howling crowd of us,
into stages, variously horsed, for the eight-mile drive to the first
spectacle of the Park--a place called the Mammoth Hot Springs. "What
means this eager, anxious throng?" I asked the