had certainly been the horses. Those redskins had eaten them; or at least the best parts of them, and what was left," and again the old eyes grew merry, "was of no value to us.

"Basquet was mad. 'You blamed hounds,' he roared, shaking his fist in rage as he gazed around in hope of seeing some of them, 'I'd like to catch you.' He even threw up his rifle and fired at a hummock off about a hundred yards, but of course he did not think that was an Indian.

"As the horses were gone, I don't imagine that any of us really wanted to catch the thieves, for we would not have wanted to take the lives of even the men unless they showed fight, and we would not have known what to do with them had we caught any of the women or children.

"But there wasn't a single Indian in sight, though the country was very level and we knew they were not far away.

"You see all the Indians went naked. None of those south of Eugene in the west central part of Oregon wore any clothing, and those in California were the same way. They could lie quietly in a depression of the ground, and their bodies, being so nearly the color of the earth, we could not see them.

"We didn't try very hard to find them, anyway, as soon as Basquet's wrath cooled down a little. It may have been that as we rode around for a few moments that a slight mound in a hollow was about the size of an Indian urchin, but I took care not to examine too closely to find out.

"We did not need to fear them, for we were much better armed than they were. At that day very few of them had guns, and what they did have were generally of an inferior quality. They did not have the advantage of location, either, that the Modocs had: and besides were not so warlike, although they did give some trouble two or three years later. Then, while they would steal horses and make them

selves a nuisance, they did not care to go to war.

"Their supper, mainly a large kettle full of a sort of mush made of manzanita berries, was still cooking over the fire. The six of us-there were six of us after the horses-ate it all up," and again the jolly narrator laughed merrily, but no more so than he had over the joke, if joke it could be called, that had been played upon themselves.

"After we got through, to pay them off we burned their camp; that is, everything except what we could use. Besides a large supply of arrows like those I have described, we found quite a lot of fishing tackle and took that along. They had spears that they. used in fishing. These, like the arrows, were long, straight sticks, but they had the duclaw of the deer split and fastened to a line, and when the fish was impaled, the duclaw came loose from the shaft of the spear and spread so that the fish could not get away, acting like the ordinary hook, but being still more effective.

"My father and I went as far as San Francisco on that trip. Wasn't much there at that time," he continued reminiscently; "just a few dwekkubgs and a warehouse or two. While there, we cut out the timbers and boards for a warehouse from redwood logs with a whipsaw. My father was very good at using the saw, and handled the end that guided the work, and I was just his helper. We made fine wages at it, for workmen were hard to get, most men preferring to hunt for gold.

"The result was that our journey to California paid us all right in dollars and cents as well as experience and pleasure, even if we didn't find any gold mine or look ahead and see the future great city and make ourselves rich by investing in its sandpile lots," and he leaned back good humoredly, with evidently no special regrets over failure to have taken advantage of past opportunities.

T

HE history of Robert Hatter was much the same as that of many others. He had been born in the country; ambition carried him to the city; he had gone into business, and become engrossed in it. At the age of ten he sold Sunday papers on the streets of his native town. The mothers of lazy boys pointed him out as an example. And such pointing was all the more potent in that the father of this exemplar was in fairly prosperous circumstances, having a small business that kept his family nicely. When but fifteen, Robert Hatter could boast of a bank account. At that age, indeed, he was too shrewd to waste a peanut on an elephant. He had learned the value of money, and his parents were satisfied with him. They admitted to themselves that neither of them had possessed the hoarding instinct sufficiently. They had not even taught it to their son, though they approved it in him and the energy which went with it. Undoubtedly it had been inspired by another person. While he was but a little fellow, a plutocrat and politician, noted in the community for his success, had patted the boy cordially on the head and thus advised him: "Always get something for everything you do. You have only one life to live, and don't forget that success is money."

Robert Hatter never did forget. When at twenty-four he set out to conquer the city it was with that idea in mind, and repeating that axiom: "I have only one life to live, and I have no time to be a fool."

The gold-gathering lures of the metropolis consequently enticed him little. In three years, after serving a necessary clerkship, he started in a

produce commission business for himself. This was the beginning of the great engrossment. He worked from gray morning till midnight. But toward the end of his twenty-eighth year he took the time and the trouble to get married.

She had two thousand dollars, this young lady, of intensely respectable people, and she had a plain, wistful face that constantly did its best to smile. This faded out with the years somewhat, but it appealed to Robert Hatter then. He remembered always the first day he saw her when she came smiling toward him through a field of dead autumn grass. Later she had thrilled him by admitting how much she admired his type of a man.

Fifteen years after he married her she died. Robert Hatter was worth a quarter of a million dollars by this time. She had proven a very good wife. It was a great loss, but the interest in new investments helped him over it. Though the look on the face of the dead, the ashen futility which death drew out from this attempt at gratitude and self-compensation, haunted him. Their only child, a boy of thirteen, he sent away to boarding school. He chose a select place where he knew that only the proper code would be taught him. This boy was in general physical appearance like his mother. He had his father's chin, however, which was long and squareset. And he had something, too, of his father's vitality. Every six months the father visited him at the school. And he never failed to impress upon him as they walked in the fields where the wild birds sang and the flowers gave up their perfume that Money was the Great Power and the Great Success

in the world, and that one must have a great deal of it.

He was in the habit of thinking of this son as a multimillionaire, a power in the world of finance, and the vision pleased him mightily. His ambition belonged to himself as well, however, else how could he have worked so hard. Around that phrase: "I have only one life to live," he had built his gray matter. He had now several businesses on his hands which took up almost his entire time. A maiden sister had been installed as his housekeeper, and she gave him that sort of animal loyalty and constant country sympathy which pertained to such kinship and the provincial admiration for money power.

With increasing years he found her invaluable as a companion. In one instance he prevented her

possible

marriage, and she submitted easily to his wishes when he explained that the man was not quite satisfactory, and that there would be many better chances. He advised her to find more friends of her own sex and age. Sometimes of a night he took her to the theatre. He preferred comic opera and broad humor, and laughed goodnaturedly. Certainly people might have taken him for a philanthropist. His sister always had the feeling of protecting him from other designing women. She disliked the idea of his marrying again. Since he did not seem to care about women, he gave her little reason for uneasiness in the matter. If she manufactured it-that was for her own entertainment.

firm, forcible and to the point, and he seemed to take it to heart. He sent a trusted clerk with him to help him conduct the business, but was rather proud when in six months his son wrote that he no longer needed this man, but felt entirely capable of running things himself. At his end, Robert Hatter was as busy as ever. He had come to look upon every hour as an entity representing so much material advantage to him. His health, however, was no longer what it had once been.

A year and a half of initiation in business, and Robert Hatter, Jr., married. Oddly enough, the woman had quietly divorced him before his father had a chance to see her. Shortly after the business in the North went unexpectedly bankrupt, and Robert Hatter, Jr., came home. He blamed it on the woman, bad advice, and inevitable conditions, and the father believed him. For pleading his own case thus, he reflected, and somehow poignantly, the saddened aspect of his mother, though sadness had little part in his general character. Besides, the matter was somewhat swept away when Robert Hatter suffered a slight apoplectic stroke. One arm and shoulder were disabled. He kept the boy at home, teaching him the handling of his different interests. In a few months' time he, himself, had resumed as far as was possible all of his former activities. Then it became necessary for him to go to the far East to establish an export trade in a certain commodity and look over some mining prospects in China. The trip might restore his health, he thought.

He stayed away a year, spending the last six months of it in the interior. Coming back to Shanghai he found his mail waiting him, and it foreshadowed trouble at home. Accidentally, he encountered Jensen, the trusted clerk, whom he had sent North with his son, and whom the latter had let go. Unpleasant misgivings impelled him to ply this man with questions. The account which Jensen gave made it certain that it was fast living, gambling, dissolute companions and downright

refusal to take advice on the part of the young manager which had caused the bankruptcy.

Robert Hatter reached home with a saddened heart and an angry mind. He was met by his chief lieutenant, who told him another story. Robert Hatter, Jr., had been impossible to control or advise. He had drawn large sums out of the business and thrown it to the winds. Five months past he had married a girl after an hour's acquaintance in a cafe, and in six weeks. she ran away with another man, taking with her several thousand thousand dollars' worth of jewels which young Hatter had bought for her. He was given a divorce, but there was no chance to prosecute. Then an actress with whom the young man had evidently been associated a long time, and who probably regretted the loss of the jewels brought a breach of promise suit against him. for thirty thousand dollars, and won it handily by virtue of a honeyed correspondence she had had the wisdom to preserve.

These unimaginable proceedings, so utterly at variance with the tenets of his own life and all that he expected in his offspring, Robert Hatter heard with feelings hard to describe. His

very blood went sick, his lungs seemed to forget to breathe. The flood of his years came upon him in an instant.

In a terrible rage, he sent for his son. "You have cost me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars," he said. "You are thirty-two years old. What do you mean by this wasteful, libertine life?"

For the first time they stood unmasked and facing each other in their elementals. The long, square-set chin of the boy had drawn out and down with the stubbornness of his elder. And he proved that he had inherited something else besides. Unconscious that he was using the other's phrase, he replied with a flame in the words:

"I am your only heir, and I have only one life to live. I represent the repression of both my mother and yourself."

This reply, so hard, so familiar, and turned to such a meaning seemed to stun Robert Hatter. He sank back into his chair, his mouth twisted awry, regarding his son. At this moment another stroke came upon him, and without the power of speech his face retained that strange expression for the few months which elapsed before his death.

LENNA B. MELTON.

I'

T WOULD be an awful nuisance to close the flat," sighed Laura Murray, when her long-legged husband suggested a cottage in the country for the spring and summer months. "But, as you say, it's weeks since we've spent a peaceful day together. Really, Alan, I see so little of you alone that I'm beginning to forget what you're actually like."

The Murrays had not been married long. In fact, they were at that blissful stage when the most attractive number in the world is "two," and the addition of even one may constitute a mob. Among a great number of friends but few realized this state of affairs, and an endless procession of callers. did their best to make this blessed state, in Laura's eyes at any rate, a "cussed" one.

They happened in, informally, for breakfast, lunch and dinner-sometimes for all three. No hour seemed too early, none too late for a noisy invasion of the little flat. A tempting supper for two would be would be happily planned and prepared with loving care by Mrs. Murray, to be ruthlessly intruded upon at the last minute, and no evening, balmy or stormy, was immune from the uninvited guest.

One night, in the precious after-dinner hour, Alan and Laura were sitting hand in hand gossiping over the fire, and lazily blinking into the "hollow down by the flare."

"Who was the wise man who once said that his idea of real bliss was 'four feet on the fender?'" she asked, smiling at the two big and two little shoes perched up to the blaze.

"I don't know, Honey, but he surely was a wise man, whoever he was," answered Alan.

He had scarcely ceased to speak when a loud, determined ring at the door bell interrupted. Despairingly, the Murrays looked at one another.

"I'm not going to answer," said Laura. "This is the first night we've had together all week, and I won't have it spoiled."

Alan said nothing, but he stiffened a little as the bell sounded again.

At the third ring, Laura's resolution melted. "They make me sick, just plumb sick," she muttered, as dragged her lazy length from the low, cozy arm chair, and stumbled out into the dark hall.

A minute later Cousin Mona's voice filled the house. "What!" she exclaimed, as she flung into the living room. "As I live! Spooning in the dark, you Sentimental Sillies! There'll be no more of that, not while Cousin Mona is here," and she gaily snapped on the lights.

Alan and Laura blinked in the sudden glare, but offered no protest as she prattled on. "Althea and Tom said they'd be in after the 'nick,' and they're going to bring tamales, and we'll all have a party," she concluded, plumping down into Laura's chair.

"Fine! Fine!" exclaimed Alan, abstractedly, as he leaned over to poke the fire. His eyes carefully avoided Laura's. Althea and Tom were as good as their word, and the last night in the week passed like all those before it, and, as Laura afterwards complained to Alan, like most of the nights to come probably would pass. Alan stroked his wife's pretty hair. "I think, dear, it's about time we did something definite, or our beautiful dispositions and our sense of hospitalitv will be ruined forever."