that a woman is equal to a man and should have all a man's privileges
about going around by her lonesome if she so feels."

"Well, you seem to have extracted a fair amount of information,
considering that she's hardly got her feet planted."

"Oh," confessed Brophy, "it came out because I made her mad when I
hinted that it was kind of queer for a woman to be traveling around
alone up here. Well, now that they're voting, you can look for 'most
anything. What shall I tell her from you when I take in her pie?"

"I'll wait on the lady after I eat my supper."

When the drive master was ushered into the parlor-presence by the
landlord, the lady was sitting in front of an open Franklin stove,
smoking a cigarette. She had made a change in attire since her arrival,
the new garb suggesting that she proposed to suit herself to the nature
of the region to which she had come. She was in knickerbocker costume,
had tipped back her chair, one foot on the hearth and the other foot
propped on her knee, and she asked Latisan to sit down, pointing to a
chair beside her. She offered a cigarette with a real masculine
offhandedness. The caller faltered something about a pipe. She insisted
that he smoke his pipe. "It rather puts strangers at their ease, don't
you think, a little tobacco haze in the room?"

Latisan, packing the bowl of his briar, agreed.

"I take it that you're well acquainted with this region?"

"Fairly so, though I know the Tomah country better."

"You're a guide, I understand."

"I don't understand where you got that information, madam," replied the
drive master, a bit pricked.

"I don't remember that anybody did tell me that in so many words.
Somehow it was my impression. But no matter. Please listen a moment."
She smiled on him, checking his attempt at a statement regarding
himself; she had conned her little speech and used her best vocabulary
to impress this woodsman. "No doubt you have something very important in
the way of occupation. A man of your bearing is bound to. You needn't
thank me for a compliment--I'm very frank. That's the way to get on and
accomplish things quickly. So I'm frank enough to say it's my habit to
meet men on the plane of man to man. Please do not regard me as a
woman--that sort of stuff is old-fashioned in these days. I vote and pay
taxes. Yet if I were merely a woman you gave evidence on the station
platform to-day that you know how to protect one from insults. I was
attracted by tha