degrees of animosity. It meant a limitation of freedom in their wildly
reckless living. The "Permit" nights would now, to say the least, be
subject to criticism; the Sunday wolf-hunts and horse-races, with their
attendant delights, would now be pursued under the eye of the Church,
and this would not add to the enjoyment of them. One great charm of the
country, which Bruce, himself the son of an Edinburgh minister, and now
Secretary of the Noble Seven, described as "letting a fellow do as he
blanked pleased," would be gone. None resented more bitterly than he the
missionary's intrusion, which he declared to be an attempt "to
reimpose upon their freedom the trammels of an antiquated and bigoted
conventionality." But the rest of the Company, while not taking
so decided a stand, were agreed that the establishment of a church
institution was an objectionable and impertinent as well as unnecessary
proceeding.

Of course, Hi Kendal and his friend Bronco Bill had no opinion one way
or the other. The Church could hardly affect them even remotely. A dozen
years' stay in Montana had proved with sufficient clearness to them that
a church was a luxury of civilization the West might well do without.

Outside the Company of the Noble Seven there was only one whose opinion
had value in Swan Creek, and that was the Old Timer. The Company had
sought to bring him in by making him an honorary member, but he refused
to be drawn from his home far up among the hills, where he lived with
his little girl Gwen and her old half-breed nurse, Ponka. The approach
of the church he seemed to resent as a personal injury. It represented
to him that civilization from which he had fled fifteen years ago with
his wife and baby girl, and when five years later he laid his wife in
the lonely grave that could be seen on the shaded knoll just fronting
his cabin door, the last link to his past was broken. From all that