“As soon as I’ve done with these figures I’ll have in Jim, your jailer, and then you’ll hear some things about the American mountain mule that you never heard before, I believe.”  As he spoke, my Gouverneur Faulkner proceeded with making figures with his pencil, a fine glow of eagerness added to that of rage in his eyes very deep under their brows.  “Now, I’ll go and call in Jim,” he said after a few minutes of waiting, and left the room in which I was then alone with my Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, who came to me with outstretched hands.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Roberta,” he exclaimed, “I am in a debt of gratitude to you for bringing this great gentleman, your friend, to my rescue and also to the solving of this very strange situation concerning these contracts.  Indeed have you accomplished the mission for which you enlisted:  your ‘Friends for France.’  But before procedure I must ask you, little lady, why it was that you made a vanishment from that hotel of Ritz-Carlton in New York.  I sought you.  I sought out that Monsieur Peter Scudder to inquire for you.  Behold, he also is in sorrow over the loss of you and had for me a strange news of a cup of tea thrown in the face of that Mr. Raines of Saint Louis by a member of your family who had departed immediately into the south of America.  I said to myself, ’The beautiful child does not know that your heart is in anxiety for her,’ and immediately I intended to seek you in the city, to which the very fine lady, who had reported that ‘tea fight’ as she so spoke of it to her paper, directed me after my finding of her.  It is a great ease to my unhappy heart to find you in the care of a family and friends.  I make compliments on your costume of the ride.  I also observed the custom of attire masculine to be on those plains of the great West where I sought the wheat.”

“It is a great joy to me, mon Capitaine, that you give to me your approval.  Much has happened to me in these short weeks since you left me in loneliness on that great ship that I must tell to you,” I said as a sob rose into my words.

“Poor little girl, it will not be many hours now before I can say to you the things that have been growing in my heart for you since that night upon the ship,” he said to me in a great tenderness as he raised my hand and bent to kiss it just as entered the great Gouverneur Faulkner and the wild Jim.

I had not the courage to gaze upon the face of my Gouverneur Faulkner, but I felt its coldness strike into my body and turn it to hardness.

For a second I stood as a stone, then a sudden resolve rose in me and again that daredevil seized upon my thought.  I took a piece of that white paper with caution and also a pencil, and with them slipped from the room, while that wild Jim seated himself upon my lowly stool beside the table at which again the two great men were writing.

And out in the soft light that was now slowly fading from the side of the mountain because of the retirement of the sun, I sat me down upon the step of the hut and wrote to my Gouverneur Faulkner this small letter: