"Hell--that old whale and her!" growled Jonas Billings, the keeper of
the livery-stable.

At Mazarine's words the Young Doctor, a man of rare gifts, individuality
and authority in the place, who had come to the station to see a patient
off to the mountains by this train, drew in his breath sharply, as though
a spirit of repugnance was in his heart. This happened during the first
years of the Young Doctor's career at Askatoon, when he was still alive
with human prejudices, although he had a nature well balanced and
singularly just. The strife between his prejudices and his sense of
justice was what made him always interesting in all the great prairie and
foothill country of which Askatoon was the centre.

He had got his shock, indeed, before Mazarine had introduced his wife to
the Mayor. Not for nothing had he studied the human mind in its relation
to the human body, and the expression of that mind speaking through the
body. The instant Joel Mazarine and his wife stepped out of the train,
he knew they were what they were to each other. That was a real
achievement in knowledge, because Mazarine was certainly sixty-five if he
was a day, and his wife was a slim, willowy slip of a girl, not more than
nineteen years of age, with the most wonderful Irish blue eyes and long
dark lashes. There was nothing of the wife or woman about her, save
something in the eyes, which seemed to belong to ages past and gone,
something so solemnly wise, yet so painfully confused, that there flashed
into the Young Doctor's mind at first glance of her the vision of a young
bird caught from its thoughtless, sunbright journeyings, its reckless
freedom of winged life, into the captivity of a cage.

She smiled, this child, as she shook hands with the Mayor, and it had the
appeal of one who had learned the value of smiling--as though it answered