one end of the state to the other without a gun or any
means of self-defense."

"Now, that is something new to think about," said Donald.

"And it's something that is very true," said Linda. "I have seen it
work times without number. Father and I went quietly up the mountains,
through the canyons, across the desert, and we would never see a snake
of any kind, but repeatedly we would see men with guns and dogs out to
kill, to trespass on the rights of the wild, and they would be hunting
for sticks and clubs and firing their guns where we had passed never
thinking of lurking danger. If you start out in accord, at one with
Nature, you're quite as safe as you are at home, sometimes more so. But
if you start out to stir up a fight, the occasion is very rare on which
you can't succeed."

"And that reminds me," said Donald, with a laugh, "that a week ago I
came to start a fight with you. What has become of that fight we were
going to have, anyway?"

"You can search me," laughed Linda, throwing out her hands in a graceful
gesture. "There's not a scrap of fight in my system concerning you, but
if Oka Sayye were having a fight with you and I were anywhere around,
you'd have one friend who would help you to handle the Jap."

Donald looked at Linda thoughtfully.

"By the great hocus-pocus," he said, "you know, I believe you. If two
fellows were having a pitched battle most of the girls I know would
quietly faint or run, but I do believe that you would stand by and help
a fellow if he needed it."

"That I surely would," said Linda; "but don't you say 'most of the girls
I know' and then make a statement like that concerning girls, because
you prove that you don't know them at all. A few years ago, I very
distinctly recall how angry many women were at this line in one of
Kipling's poems:

The female of the species is more deadly than the male,

and there was nothing to it save that a great poet was trying to pay
womanhood everywhere the finest compliment he knew how. He always has
been fundamental in his process of thought. He gets right back to the
heart of primal things. When he wrote that line he was not really
thinking that there was a nasty poison in the heart of a woman or death
in her hands. What he was thinking was that in the jungle the female
lion or tiger or jaguar must go and find a particularly secluded cave
and bear her young and raise them to be quite active kittens before she
leads them out, because the