“Nielsen wasn’t a fool, was he?” she queried.  “As I understand, he made three millions here.”

“Only too true, and that fact is responsible for my being here.”

“And for me, too,” she said.  “Dad heard about him in the Marquesas, and so we started.  Only poor Dad didn’t get here.”

“He—­your father—­died?” he faltered.

She nodded, and her eyes grew soft and moist.

“I might as well begin at the beginning.”  She lifted her head with a proud air of dismissing sadness, after, the manner of a woman qualified to wear a Baden-Powell and a long-barrelled Colt’s.  “I was born at Hilo.  That’s on the island of Hawaii—­the biggest and best in the whole group.  I was brought up the way most girls in Hawaii are brought up.  They live in the open, and they know how to ride and swim before they know what six-times-six is.  As for me, I can’t remember when I first got on a horse nor when I learned to swim.  That came before my A B C’s.  Dad owned cattle ranches on Hawaii and Maui—­big ones, for the islands.  Hokuna had two hundred thousand acres alone.  It extended in between Mauna Koa and Mauna Loa, and it was there I learned to shoot goats and wild cattle.  On Molokai they have big spotted deer.  Von was the manager of Hokuna.  He had two daughters about my own age, and I always spent the hot season there, and, once, a whole year.  The three of us were like Indians.  Not that we ran wild, exactly, but that we were wild to run wild.  There were always the governesses, you know, and lessons, and sewing, and housekeeping; but I’m afraid we were too often bribed to our tasks with promises of horses or of cattle drives.

“Von had been in the army, and Dad was an old sea-dog, and they were both stern disciplinarians; only the two girls had no mother, and neither had I, and they were two men after all.  They spoiled us terribly.  You see, they didn’t have any wives, and they made chums out of us—­when our tasks were done.  We had to learn to do everything about the house twice as well as the native servants did it—­that was so that we should know how to manage some day.  And we always made the cocktails, which was too holy a rite for any servant.  Then, too, we were never allowed anything we could not take care of ourselves.  Of course the cowboys always roped and saddled our horses, but we had to be able ourselves to go out in the paddock and rope our horses—­”

“What do you mean by rope?” Sheldon asked.

“To lariat them, to lasso them.  And Dad and Von timed us in the saddling and made a most rigid examination of the result.  It was the same way with our revolvers and rifles.  The house-boys always cleaned them and greased them; but we had to learn how in order to see that they did it properly.  More than once, at first, one or the other of us had our rifles taken away for a week just because of a tiny speck of rust.  We had to know how to build fires in the driving rain, too, out of wet wood, when we camped out, which was the hardest thing of all—­except grammar, I do believe.  We learned more from Dad and Von than from the governesses; Dad taught us French and Von German.  We learned both languages passably well, and we learned them wholly in the saddle or in camp.