As I came towards the new friends they did not appear to be joking, and on seeing me Miss Buckner said to Lin, “Did he know?”

Lin hesitated.

“You did know!” she exclaimed, but lost her resentment at once, and continued, very quietly and with a friendly tone, “I reckon you don’t like to have to tell folks bad news.”

It was I that now hesitated.

“Not to a strange girl, anyway!” said she.  “Well, now I have good news to tell you.  You would not have given me any shock if you had said you knew about poor Nate, for that’s the reason—­Of course those things can’t be secrets!  Why, he’s only twenty, sir!  How should he know about this world?  He hadn’t learned the first little thing when he left home five years ago.  And I am twenty-three—­old enough to be Nate’s grandmother, he’s that young and thoughtless.  He couldn’t ever realize bad companions when they came around.  See that!” She showed me a paper, taking it out like a precious thing, as indeed it was; for it was a pardon signed by Governor Barker.  “And the Governor has let me carry it to Nate myself.  He won’t know a thing about it till I tell him.  The Governor was real kind, and we will never forget him.  I reckon Nate must have a mustache by now?” said she to Lin.

“Yes,” Lin answered, gruffly, looking away from her, “he has got a mustache all right.”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” said I, for something to say.

“Of course he will!  How many hours did you say we will be?” she asked Lin, turning from me again, for Mr. McLean had not been losing time.  It was plain that between these two had arisen a freemasonry from which I was already shut out.  Her woman’s heart had answered his right impulse to tell her about her brother, and I had been found wanting!

So now she listened over again to the hours of stage jolting that “we” had before us, and that lay between her and Nate.  “We would be four—­ herself, Lin, myself, and the boy Billy.”  Was Billy the one at supper?  Oh no; just Billy Lusk, of Laramie.  “He’s a kid I’m taking up the country,” Lin explained.  “Ain’t you most tuckered out?”

“Oh, me!” she confessed, with a laugh and a sigh.

There again!  She had put aside my solicitude lightly, but was willing Lin should know her fatigue.  Yet, fatigue and all, she would not sleep in the agent’s room.  At sight of it and the close quarters she drew back into the outer office, so prompted by that inner, unsuspected strictness she had shown me before.

“Come out!” she cried, laughing.  “Indeed, I thank you.  But I can’t have you sleep on this hard floor out here.  No politeness, now!  Thank you ever so much.  I’m used to roughing it pretty near as well as if I was—­a cowboy!” And she glanced at Lin.  “They’re calling forty-seven,” she added to the agent.

“That’s me,” he said, coming out to the telegraph instrument.  “So you’re one of us?”

“I didn’t know forty-seven meant Separ,” said I.  “How in the world do you know that?”