“Father, you don’t doubt me, too, do you?”

“Doubt you?  My God no, child!  It’s only I never knew how much I loved you till I realized I might have to part with you.”

How strange and non-understanding and non-understandable these men creatures were!  Eleanor looked at him; and looked at him.  Then she threw her arms round his neck and kissed the dark sad silent face with a frightened tender fervor; and do not laugh, dear reader; for it is only on the stage that the graceful altogether elegant curtain-drop comes; but the old frontiersman had somehow got himself outside the screen door, and immediately on that kiss came through the mosquito wire such a thunder clap of pulpit artillery as is the peculiar prerogative of some large gentlemen when they blow their nose.  MacDonald and Eleanor both burst out laughing; and Eleanor noticed it was a large red cotton one, two for ten they sold in Smelter City.

And all the while, Wayland sat crunched in the chair of the Cabin, gazing and gazing at the face in the picture above “the Happy Warrior,” till the light faded from the Holy Cross and the moon beams struck aslant the timbered floor, and Calamity’s shadow stood in the doorway with a basket on her arm.

“Meesis Villiam send up y’ supper,” she said.

Wayland ate mechanically.  He did not know that he was bursting out with angry words all through the meal.

“To think, they’d stoop, they’d dare to splash their filth and hog-wash on her skirts, to hurt me?  Well, they’ve got me, Calamity?  They’ve got me, old girl!  But they’ve got me in a way they don’t expect!  You Indians knew the courts were a fraud and lie.  They’d have cleared this kind of blackguardism up with a knife.  Well—­so will I; but it will be another kind of knife.  You can’t out-Herod a skunk; but you can bury it, Calamity, eh, old girl?  We’ll bury ’em so deep next election, they’ll never see daylight:  then we’ll pile this pack of exposure on ’em so high they’ll never get up again.  We’re out for scalps, Calamity!  No more fighting in the open, eh?  We’ll spring it on ’em the way you Indians put a knife in a man’s back.”

“Iss it Moy-eese, heem keel little boy?” asked Calamity softly.

Something in the soft hiss of the words made the Ranger turn.  There was a mad look in the glint of the black eyes, and the hands were kneading nervously in and out of the palms.

“Yes, damn him, it is Moyese, who is at the bottom of all this deviltry; but don’t you worry, Calamity!  We’re going to get his scalp!”

He paced the Ridge half the night planning his campaign.  He would go first thing in the morning and get that child’s story of the mine and the “dummy” entryman.  Then, he would get that Swede’s affidavit before the thick-tow-head realized what he was after.  Then, he would get a trained geologist for the examination of the mine, not that flannelled kindergartner, stuck full of bureaucratic self importance