and was not easy to read, here and there.  But you could piece out the drift of it, and there was Mrs. Taylor by your side, eager to help you when you stumbled.  Miss Peck wrote that she was overworked in Sidney, Nebraska, and needed a holiday.  When the weather grew warm she should like to come to Bear Creek and be like old times.  “Like to come and be like old times” filled Mrs. Taylor with sentiment and the cow-punchers with expectation.  But it is a long way from February to warm weather on Bear Creek, and even cow-punchers will forget about a new girl if she does not come.  For several weeks I had not heard Miss Peck mentioned, and old girls had to do.  Yesterday, however, when I paid a visit to Miss Molly Wood (the Bear Creek schoolmistress), I found her keeping in order the cabin and the children of the Taylors, while they were gone forty-five miles to the stage station to meet their guest.

“Well,” said Lin, judicially, “Miss Wood is a lady.”

“Yes,” said I, with deep gravity.  For I was thinking of an occasion when Mr. McLean had discovered that truth somewhat abruptly.

Lin thoughtfully continued.  “She is—­she’s—­she’s—­what are you laughin’ at?”

“Oh, nothing.  You don’t see quite so much of Miss Wood as you used to, do you?”

“Huh!  So that’s got around.  Well, o’ course I’d ought t’ve knowed better, I suppose.  All the same, there’s lots and lots of girls do like gettin’ kissed against their wishes—­and you know it.”

“But the point would rather seem to be that she—­”

“Would rather seem!  Don’t yu’ start that professor style o’ yours, or I’ll—­I’ll talk more wickedness in worse language than ever yu’ve heard me do yet.”

“Impossible!” I murmured, sweetly, and Master Lin went on.

“As to point—­that don’t need to be explained to me.  She’s a lady all right.”  He ruminated for a moment.  “She has about scared all the boys off, though,” he continued.  “And that’s what you get by being refined,” he concluded, as if Providence had at length spoken in this matter.

“She has not scared off a boy from Virginia, I notice,” said I.  “He was there yesterday afternoon again.  Ridden all the way over from Sunk Creek.  Didn’t seem particularly frightened.”

“Oh, well, nothin’ alarms him—­not even refinement,” said Mr. McLean, with his grin.  “And she’ll fool your Virginian like she done the balance of us.  You wait.  Shucks!  If all the girls were that chilly, why, what would us poor punchers do?”

“You have me cornered,” said I, and we sat in a philosophical silence, Lin on the floor still, and I at the window.  There I looked out upon a scene my eyes never tired of then, nor can my memory now.  Spring had passed over it with its first, lightest steps.  The pastured levels undulated in emerald.  Through the many-changing sage, that just this moment of to-day was lilac, shone greens scarce a week old in the dimples of the foot-hills;