“I didn’t have myself from the first,” I reminded her, “and I believe only a few trifles less than Jim does.  I know that robins ascend without visible means, for example, if you run at them; but I believe it’s good to run at them just the same, even more enjoyable than if they sat still to be caught.”

“We were speaking of dogs,” said Miss Lansdale.  “At any rate Jim had you from the first.”

“Let us keep to dogs, then,” I answered.  “Meantime, if you listen to me, you’ll soon be in deep water, when we’ve both lost the taste for adventure.  This current will take us over the dam in about seven minutes, I should judge.”

She fell to the oars again with a dreaming face, in which Lansdale and the other were so well blended that it was indeed the face of visions that had long been coming to me.

“You remind me again of the wild gentleman,” I said, after a long look at her, a look which she was good enough to let me see that she observed.

“Et ego in Arcadia vixi—­and I, too, was netted in my native jungle.”

I saw that she, too, essayed the feat of being both light and serious without letting the seam show.

“I mean about pictures,” I explained.  “The gentlemanly curator of the side-show always says of the wild man thoughtfully, ’I believe he has a few photographs for sale.’  He is always right—­the wild man does have them, though I should not care to say that they’re worth the money; that depends upon one’s tastes, of course—­by the way, Miss Lansdale, I have long had a picture of you.”

“Has mother—­”

“No—­long before I became a fellow-slave with Clem—­long before there was a juvenile mother or even a Clem in Little Arcady.”

“May I ask how you got it?”

“Certainly you may!  I don’t know.”

“May I see it?” I thought she felt a deeper interest than she cared to reveal.

“Unfortunately, no.  If you only could see it, you would see that it is almost a perfect likeness—­perhaps a bit more Little Miss than you could be now—­but it’s unmistakably true.”

“I lost such a picture once,” she said with a fall of her eyes.  “Where is the one you have?”

“Sometimes it’s behind my eyes and sometimes it is out before them.”

“Nonsense!”

“To be sure!  Only Jim and I, trained and hardened in the ways of belief, are equal to a feat of that sort.”

“I see no merit in believing that.”

“I don’t know that there is, especially—­not in believing this particular thing, but the power for belief in general which it implies—­you see I am unprejudiced.”

“Why should you want to believe it?”

I should have known, without catching the glint of her eyes under the hat brim, that a Peavey spoke there.

“If you could see the thing once, you’d understand,” I said, an answer, of course, fit only for a Peavey.

“At all events, you’ll not keep it long.”  The words were Peavey enough, but the voice was rather curiously Lansdale.