While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station, its ruling spirit was of far alien character.  This was John Ronackstone, a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements.  After one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate and recant its announcement.

Nevertheless Richard Mivane expected “some sense,” as he phrased it, from this adamantine pioneer.  Such a man naturally arrogated and obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of vacillation furthered this preeminence.  He was a good man in the main as well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the demagogue.  And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions and fostered no follies, his home life harbored no fripperies.  His domicile was a contrast to the better ordered homes of the station, but here one might have meat and shelter, and what more should mortal ask of a house!  He often boasted that not an atom of iron entered into its structure more than into an Indian’s wigwam.  Even the clapboards were fastened on to the rafters with wooden pegs in lieu of nails, although nails were not difficult to procure.  He had that antagonism to the mere conventions of civilization often manifested by those who have been irked by such fetters before finally casting them off.  It was a wholesome life and a free, and if the inmates of the house did not mind the scent of the drying deerskins hanging from the beams, which made the nose of Richard Mivane very coy, the visitor saw no reason why they should not please themselves.  The stone-flagged hearth extended half across the room, and sprawling upon it in frowsy disorder was a bevy of children of all ages, as fat as pigs and as happy-go-lucky.  He had hardly seated himself, having stepped about carefully among their chubby fingers and toes lest a crushing disaster supervene, than he regretted his choice of a confidant.  He had his own, unsuspected sensitiveness, which was suddenly jarred when the wife in the corner, rocking the cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness, cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel.  With that frequent yet unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice