Joe left the two ministers talking earnestly and turned toward Mrs. Wentz.  The fur-trader’s wife was glowing with pleasure.  She held in her hand several rude trinkets, and was explaining to her listener, a young woman, that the toys were for the children, having been brought all the way from Williamsburg.

“Kate, where’s Nell?” Joe asked of the girl.

“She went on an errand for Mrs. Wentz.”

Kate Wells was the opposite of her sister.  Her motions were slow, easy and consistent with her large, full, form.  Her brown eyes and hair contrasted sharply with Nell’s.  The greatest difference in the sisters lay in that Nell’s face was sparkling and full of the fire of her eager young life, while Kate’s was calm, like the unruffled surface of a deep lake.

“That’s Jim, my brother.  We’re going with you,” said Joe.

“Are you?  I’m glad,” answered the girl, looking at the handsome earnest face of the young minister.

“Your brother’s like you for all the world,” whispered Mrs. Wentz.

“He does look like you,” said Kate, with her slow smile.

“Which means you think, or hope, that that is all,” retorted Joe laughingly.  “Well, Kate, there the resemblance ends, thank God for Jim!”

He spoke in a sad, bitter tone which caused both women to look at him wonderingly.  Joe had to them ever been full of surprises; never until then had they seen evidences of sadness in his face.  A moment’s silence ensued.  Mrs. Wentz gazed lovingly at the children who were playing with the trinkets; while Kate mused over the young man’s remark, and began studying his, half-averted face.  She felt warmly drawn to him by the strange expression in the glance he had given his brother.  The tenderness in his eyes did not harmonize with much of this wild and reckless boy’s behavior.  To Kate he had always seemed so bold, so cold, so different from other men, and yet here was proof that Master Joe loved his brother.

The murmured conversation of the two ministers was interrupted by a low cry from outside the cabin.  A loud, coarse laugh followed, and then a husky voice: 

“Hol’ on, my purty lass."’

Joe took two long strides, and was on the door-step.  He saw Nell struggling violently in the grasp of the half-drunken teamster.

“I’ll jes’ hev’ to kiss this lassie fer luck,” he said in a tone of good humor.

At the same instant Joe saw three loungers laughing, and a fourth, the grizzled frontiersman, starting forward with a yell.

“Let me go!” cried Nell.

Just when the teamster had pulled her close to him, and was bending his red, moist face to hers, two brown, sinewy hands grasped his neck with an angry clutch.  Deprived thus of breath, his mouth opened, his tongue protruded; his eyes seemed starting from their sockets, and his arms beat the air.  Then he was lifted and flung with a crash against the cabin wall.  Falling, he lay in a heap on the grass, while the blood flowed from a cut on his temple.