LITMIR.BIZ

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picturesque in his wide hat and his fringed deerskin jacket. Miss Kinnaird pursed up her face.

      "I want to make a sketch of you. You have rather a good head," she said.

      Weston gazed at her a moment in astonishment, and then a twinkle crept into his eyes. Her matter-of-fact brusqueness, which made it perfectly plain that his views in the matter did not count, might have roused a sense of opposition in some men, but he had acquired a wide toleration in western Canada.

      "Shall I stand here, miss?" he asked.

      "No," said the girl, "a little farther to the right, where the sunlight falls upon the trunks behind you; but you mustn't look wooden. That will do. Still, you'll have to take off that jacket. It's frippery."

      The suspicion of a flush crept into Weston's face; but, after all, a loose blue shirt and duck trousers are considered dress enough in the bush of the Pacific Slope, and he discarded the offending jacket. Miss Kinnaird, however, was not quite satisfied.

      "Can't you take up that ax and look as if you were ready to use it?" she said. "Oh, no! That is far too much like a waxwork! Hold up your head a little! Now, don't move any more than you can help! I think that will do."

      Weston stood as he was for the best part of an hour. He felt inclined to wonder why he did it, as he had not found shoveling gravel anything like so difficult. Then Miss Kinnaird informed him that, as she desired to make a study of the background, she would not keep him any longer; and he strolled away to the waterside, where, after stretching himself wearily, he lay down and took out his pipe. He had not been there long when Ida, who came out from among the trees, sat down on one of the boulders not far from him.

      "You must have been horribly cramped, but it didn't strike Miss Kinnaird, or she wouldn't have kept you there so long," she said.

      "No," answered Weston, reflectively, "I don't think it would strike Miss Kinnaird. She's English, isn't she?"

      "Of course. But aren't you English, too?"

      Weston's eyes twinkled.

      "I am. Still, I don't want you to think that it's merely because Miss Kinnaird comes from the same country that I do that I didn't expect her to realize that to stand posed for an hour or so is apt to cramp one."

      Ida laughed. It evidently was clear to him that Miss Kinnaird regarded him as a packer and nothing else, and had decided that he had probably grown used to physical discomfort. Ida was, however, rather pleased to see that he accepted the fact good-humoredly and did not resent it. She was in no way astonished that he should answer her as he had, for, in the west, a man may speak naturally to any young woman who addresses him, without feeling called on to remember the distinctions of caste.

      "I wonder," she said, "whether you would tell me what caused the trouble you were mixed up in two or three nights ago."

      Weston's face grew slightly flushed, for he was still in certain respects somewhat ingenuous; but he told her simply what had led up to the affray.

      "After all you could hardly blame the boys," he added. "They had had a hard day, and it was not the first time Grenfell had done them out of their supper."

      "Still, he had spoiled your supper, too," said Ida. "If you couldn't blame them, why did you interfere?"

      It was rather a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother. The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little refinement of sentiment was expected from the country gentleman. The traditions Agnes Weston had held by, however, went back to an earlier age. She had been High Church and imaginative, a woman of impracticable as well as somewhat uncomfortable ideals, and finding her husband proof against them she had done what she could with her son. The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line. They were full-fleshed, hard-riding Englishmen who lived on beef and beer. Though Weston was naturally not aware of it, there were respects in which Ida Stirling was like his mother. Ida, however, usually kept her deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs. Weston had seldom done, but she shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome.

      "Well," he said diffidently, "it was quite a humiliating situation for the old man. He was a person of some consequence once—a rather famous assayer and mineralogist—and I think he felt it."

      "That is not what I asked you," said Ida, with a trace of dryness.

      Weston spread out his hands as though to excuse himself.

      "Then," he said, "they were all against him, and I think Jake—I mean the big chopper—would have forced the stuff down his throat. It was horribly burnt. There are," and he hesitated, "things one really has to do."

      His companion nodded. She liked his diffidence, which, while very evident, was wholly genuine, and the faint color in his face gave him an appearance of boyish candor.

      "Even when the odds against you are quite steep?" she said. "In the case we are discussing the result was no doubt that bruise on your face." Then she changed the subject. "If he was a famous mineralogist, why is he cooking in a railroad camp?"

      "Everybody knows," said Weston. "The usual trouble—whisky."

      The girl made a little gesture of comprehension that had in it also a hint of disgust, and then seeing that he would say nothing further until she gave him a lead she spoke again.

      "What brought you out here?" she inquired.

      Weston had been asked the same question several times before, and had never answered it. In fact, he did not know why he did so now.

      "I quarreled with my people. In one respect, anyway, I don't regret it. It's rather a beautiful country."

      He sat, with his wide hat tilted back and the sun on his face, looking out upon the blue lake between the towering pines. Their shadows floated in it, and tremendous slopes of rock ran up toward the gleaming snow on the farther side. The bush lay very silent under the scorching sun, and it was filled with the heavy odors of the firs, in which there was a clogging, honey-like sweetness.

      "It's a little difficult to understand why you seem to be content with track-grading. One would fancy it to be unusually hard work," said the girl.

      "Oh, yes," agreed Weston, laughing. "Still, you see, I don't intend to remain a track-grader indefinitely."

      "No?" said Ida, inquiringly. "What do you mean to do?"

      Weston saw that she was interested, and he was still young enough to be willing to discuss his own plans and projects—though for that matter one comes across older men who can talk of nothing else.

      "This country is full of gold and silver," he said. "Other men strike it now and then, and I really don't see why I shouldn't."

      "When they do, haven't they usually to sell it for almost nothing to somebody who gets up a company? Besides, do you know anything about prospecting?"

      Weston laughed.

      "A little. It's my one dissipation; and it's rather an expensive one. You have to work for months to save enough to buy a camp outfit and provisions, and if you mean to stay any time in the ranges you have to hire a horse. Then you come back in rags with a bagful of specimens that prove to be of no use at all; and you go to work again."

      "You have done that often?"

      "Three or four times."

      "Then," asked Ida, "isn't it foolish to go back again?"

      Weston looked at her a moment hesitatingly, and then made a little gesture of deprecation.

      "It sounds absurd, of course, but I have a fancy that if I keep it up long enough I shall strike gold. You see I'm a water-finder, anyway."

      "A water-finder?"

      Weston nodded.

      "It's

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