things, I suppose?  For yourself, or another?  Is that team yours?  Come,” he added, still pleasantly, but in an older and graver voice, with perhaps the least touch of experienced authority, “be frank, Jim.  Which is it?  Never mind what things you’ve told in there, tell me the truth about yourself.  Can I help you in any way?  Believe me, I should like to.  We have been old friends, whatever difference in our luck, I am yours still.”

Thus adjured, the redoubtable Jim, in a hoarse whisper, with a furtive eye on the house, admitted that he was traveling for an itinerant peddler, whom he expected to join later in the settlement; that he had his own methods of disposing of his wares, and (darkly) that his proprietor and the world generally had better not interfere with him; that (with a return to more confidential lightness) he had already “worked the Wild West Injin” business so successfully as to dispose of his wares, particularly in yonder house, and might do even more if not prematurely and wantonly “blown upon,” “gone back on,” or “given away.”

“But wouldn’t you like to settle down on some bit of land like this, and improve it for yourself?” said Clarence.  “All these valley terraces are bound to rise in value, and meantime you would be independent.  It could be managed, Jim.  I think I could arrange it for you,” he went on, with a slight glow of youthful enthusiasm.  “Write to me at Peyton’s ranch, and I’ll see you when I come back, and we’ll hunt up something for you together.”  As Jim received the proposition with a kind of gloomy embarrassment, he added lightly, with a glance at the farmhouse, “It might be near here, you know; and you’d have pleasant neighbors, and even eager listeners to your old adventures.”

“You’d better come in a minit before you go,” said Jim, clumsily evading a direct reply.  Clarence hesitated a moment, and then yielded.  For an equal moment Jim Hooker was torn between secret jealousy of his old comrade’s graces and a desire to present them as familiar associations of his own.  But his vanity was quickly appeased.

Need it be said that the two women received this fleck and foam of a super-civilization they knew little of as almost an impertinence compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less?  What availed the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim?  Yet they received him patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly grace and power, and the recipient of Jim’s friendship.  The farmer alone seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the latter’s tacit indorsement of Red Jim, through his evident previous intimacy with him, impressed the man in Jim’s favor.  All of which Clarence saw with that sensitive perception which had given him an early insight into human weakness, yet still had never shaken his youthful optimism.  He smiled a little thoughtfully, but was openly fraternal to Jim, courteous to his host and family, and, as he rode away in the faint moonlight, magnificently opulent in his largess to the farmer,—­his first and only assertion of his position.