crossed through a world of pines and creviced streams and exhilarating
silence. The little waters fell tinkling through icicles in the
loneliness of the woods, and snowshoe rabbits dived into the brush. East
Oregon, the Owyhee and the Malheur country, the old trails of General
Crook, the willows by the streams, the open swales, the high woods where
once Buffalo Horn and Chief E-egante and O-its the medicine-man
prospered, through this domain of war and memories went Bolles the
school-master with Dean Drake and Brock. The third noon from Harper's
they came leisurely down to the old Malheur Agency, where once the
hostile Indians had drawn pictures on the door, and where Castle Rock
frowned down unchanged.

"I wish I was going to stay here with you," said Brock to Drake. "By
Indian Creek you can send word to me quicker than we've come."

"Why, you're an old bat!" said the boy to his foreman, and clapped him
farewell on the shoulder.

Brock drove away, thoughtful. He was not a large man. His face was
clean-cut, almost delicate. He had a well-trimmed, yellow mustache, and
it was chiefly in his blue eye and lean cheek-bone that the frontiersman
showed. He loved Dean Drake more than he would ever tell, even to
himself.

The young superintendent set at work to ranch-work this afternoon of
Brock's leaving, and the buccaroos made his acquaintance one by one and
stared at him. Villany did not sit outwardly upon their faces; they were
not villains; but they stared at the boy sent to control them, and they
spoke together, laughing. Drake took the head of the table at supper,
with Bolles on his right. Down the table some silence, some staring, much