a bright glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor
vicious nor ruthless. He asked her where she was born, and upon
receiving an answer he followed that up with another question. And
he kept this up until Joan divined that he was not so much
interested in what he apparently wished to learn as he was in her
presence, her voice, her personality. She sensed in him loneliness,
hunger for the sound of a voice. She had heard her uncle speak of
the loneliness of lonely camp-fires and how all men working or
hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers
and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human. And she
talked as never before in her life, brightly, willingly, eloquently,
telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood--the sorrow and
the joy and some of the dreams--up to the time she had come to Camp
Hoadley.

"Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?" he asked,
after a silence.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"A whole campful," she replied, with a laugh, "but admirers is a
better name for them."

"Then there's no one fellow?"

"Hardly--yet."

"How would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for--