But events are not always logical in sequence.  Mr. Hamlin went comfortably to sleep and into a profuse perspiration.  He was awakened by a rapping at his door, and opening it, was surprised to find Mrs. Rivers with anxious inquiries as to his condition.  “Indeed,” she said, with an emotion which even her prim reserve could not conceal, “I did not know until now how serious the accident was, and how but for you and Divine Providence my little girl might have been drowned.  It seems Melinda saw it all.”

Inwardly objurgating the spying Melinda, but relieved that his playmates hadn’t broken their promise of secrecy, Mr. Hamlin laughed.

“I’m afraid that your little girl wouldn’t have got into the water at all but for me—­and you must give all the credit of getting her out to the other fellow.”  He stopped at the severe change in Mrs. Rivers’s expression, and added quite boyishly and with a sudden drop from his usual levity, “But please don’t keep the children away from me for all that, Mrs. Rivers.”

Mrs. Rivers did not, and the next day Jack and his companions sought fresh playing fields and some new story-telling pastures.  Indeed, it was a fine sight to see this pale, handsome, elegantly dressed young fellow lounging along between a blue-checkered pinafored girl on one side and a barefooted boy on the other.  The ranchmen turned and looked after him curiously.  One, a rustic prodigal, reduced by dissipation to the swine-husks of ranching, saw fit to accost him familiarly.

“The last time I saw you dealing poker in Sacramento, Mr. Hamlin, I did not reckon to find you up here playing with a couple of kids.”

“No!” responded Mr. Hamlin suavely, “and yet I remember I was playing with some country idiots down there, and you were one of them.  Well! understand that up here I prefer the kids.  Don’t let me have to remind you of it.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Hamlin could not help noticing that for the next two or three days there were many callers at the ranch and that he was obliged in his walks to avoid the highroad on account of the impertinent curiosity of wayfarers.  Some of them were of that sex which he would not have contented himself with simply calling “curious.”

“To think,” said Melinda confidently to her mistress, “that that thar Mrs. Stubbs, who wouldn’t go to the Hightown Hotel because there was a play actress thar, has been snoopin’ round here twice since that young feller came.”

Of this fact, however, Mr. Hamlin was blissfully unconscious.

Nevertheless, his temper was growing uncertain; the angle of his smart straw hat was becoming aggressive to strangers; his politeness sardonic.  And now Sunday morning had come with an atmosphere of starched piety and well-soaped respectability at the rancho, and the children were to be taken with the rest of the family to the day-long service at Hightown.  As these Sabbath pilgrimages filled the main road, he was fain to take himself and his loneliness to the trails and byways, and even to invade the haunts of some other elegant outcasts like himself—­to wit, a crested hawk, a graceful wild cat beautifully marked, and an eloquently reticent rattlesnake.  Mr. Hamlin eyed them without fear, and certainly without reproach.  They were not out of their element.