they make you think, being as you lives in just such quarters,
interesting things might happen most any minute--and they never
does."

"Why, Brick!" Lahoma reproached him. "THIS has happened--" she
nodded at Wilfred Compton. "Don't you call that interesting?"

"That's the way _I_ discusses them books," returned Willock with
manifest satisfaction. "I wasn't never no man to be overawed by no
book, which, however high and by whoever wrote, ain't no more like
life than a shadow in a pool. Try to grab that shadow, and where
is it? Just to go out after game and climb the mountains all day
and come home of an evening to sit down to a plate of bacon and
eggs, and another of the same, with coffee smoking on the little
stove, and Lahoma urging on the feast--that's more of real living
than you'd get out of a big library. Ain't it, Bill?"

"Now WE want to talk, Brick," interposed Lahoma--"don't we,
Wilfred?"

"So your cabin was built," Wilfred prompted her, "and the men took
the dugout."

"Yes--and then, oh! the most wonderful thing happened: a family
settled in the arm of the mountain at the west end--a family that
had a woman and a baby in it--a sure-enough woman with a sweet face
and of a high grade though worked down pretty level what from
hardships--and a baby that laughed, just laughed whenever he saw me
coming in the dugout--and I was over there every day. And that's
how I got to be like a woman, and know how to dress, and how to meet