and but three people remembered it with any singular distinctness--Ida,
Pierre, and Macavoy. Pierre was interested, for in his primitive mind he
knew that, however wild a promise, life is so wild in its events, there
comes the hour for redemption of all I O U's.

Meanwhile, weeks, months, and even a couple of years passed, Macavoy and
Pierre coming and going, sometimes together, sometimes not, in all manner
of words at war, in all manner of fact at peace. And Ida, out of the
bounty of her nature, gave the two vagabonds a place at her fireside
whenever they chose to come. Perhaps, where speech was not given, a gift
of divination entered into her instead, and she valued what others found
useless, and held aloof from what others found good. She had powers which
had ever been the admiration of Guidon Hill. Birds and animals were her
friends--she called them her kinsmen. A peculiar sympathy joined them; so
that when, at last, she tamed a white wild duck, and made it do the
duties of a carrier-pigeon, no one thought it strange.

Up in the hills, beside the White Sun River, lived her sister and her
sister's children; and, by and by, the duck carried messages back and
forth, so that when, in the winter, Ida's health became delicate, she had
comfort in the solicitude and cheerfulness of her sister, and the gaiety
of the young birds of her nest, who sent Ida many a sprightly message and
tales of their good vagrancy in the hills. In these days Pierre and
Macavoy were little at the Post, save now and then to sit with Hilton
beside the fire, waiting for spring and telling tales. Upon Hilton had
settled that peaceful, abstracted expectancy which shows man at his best,
as he waits for the time when, through the half-lights of his fatherhood,
he shall see the broad fine dawn of motherhood spreading up the
world--which, all being said and done, is that place called Home.
Something gentle came over him while he grew stouter in body and in all