shet up in office drors; it isn’t good for his lungs and chest.  And don’t you ink his head—­nother! youre as bad as the rest.  Johnny Dear, you must be very kind to your attopted father, and you, Glory Anna, must lov your kind Jimmy Carter verry mutch for taking you hossback so offen.  I has been buggy ridin’ with an orficer who has killed injuns real!  I am comin’ back soon with grate affeckshun, so luke out and mind.”

But it was three years before she returned, and this was her last and only letter.  The “adopted fathers” of her children were faithful, however, and when the new line was opened, and it was understood that she was to be present with her father at the ceremony, they came, with a common understanding, to the station to meet their old playmate.  They were ranged along the platform—­poor Jack Roper a little overweighted with a bundle he was carrying on his left arm.  And then a young girl in the freshness of her teens and the spotless purity of a muslin frock that although brief in skirt was perfect in fit, faultlessly booted and gloved, tripped from the train, and offered a delicate hand in turn to each of her old friends.  Nothing could be prettier than the smile on the cheeks that were no longer sunburnt; nothing could be clearer than the blue eyes lifted frankly to theirs.  And yet, as she gracefully turned away with her father, the faces of the four adopted parents were found to be as red and embarrassed as her own on the day that Yuba Bill drove up publicly with “Johnny Dear” on the box seat.

“You weren’t such a fool,” said Jack Montgomery to Roper, “as to bring Misery here with you?”

“I was,” said Roper with a constrained laugh—­“and you?” He had just caught sight of the head of a ninepin peeping from the manager’s pocket.  The man laughed, and then the four turned silently away.

“Mary” had indeed come back to them; but not “The Mother of Five!”

BULGER’S REPUTATION

We all remembered very distinctly Bulger’s advent in Rattlesnake Camp.  It was during the rainy season—­a season singularly inducive to settled reflective impressions as we sat and smoked around the stove in Mosby’s grocery.  Like older and more civilized communities, we had our periodic waves of sentiment and opinion, with the exception that they were more evanescent with us, and as we had just passed through a fortnight of dissipation and extravagance, owing to a visit from some gamblers and speculators, we were now undergoing a severe moral revulsion, partly induced by reduced finances and partly by the arrival of two families with grownup daughters on the hill.  It was raining, with occasional warm breaths, through the open window, of the southwest trades, redolent of the saturated spices of the woods and springing grasses, which perhaps were slightly inconsistent with the hot stove around which we had congregated.  But the stove was only an excuse for our listless, gregarious gathering; warmth and idleness went well together, and it was currently accepted that we had caught from the particular reptile which gave its name to our camp much of its pathetic, lifelong search for warmth, and its habit of indolently basking in it.