there were cigarette stubs and burned matches innumerable upon the
rough, board floor, and here in her hand--she turned the pages of her
favorite abstractedly and a paper fluttered out and fell, face upward,
on the floor. She stooped and recovered it, glanced and gasped.

"Well!"

It was only a pencil sketch done on cheap, unruled tablet paper, but
her mind dissolved into a chaos of interrogation marks and exclamation
points--with the latter predominating more and more the longer she looked.

It showed blunt-topped hills and a shallow coulee which she remembered
perfectly. In the foreground a young woman in a smart tailored costume,
the accuracy of which was something amazing, stood proudly surveying a
dead coyote at her feet. In a corner of the picture stood a weather-
beaten stump with a long, thin splinter beside it on the ground.
Underneath was written in characters beautifully symmetrical: "The old
maid's credential card."

There was no gainsaying the likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty
felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was
painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the
gown--"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was her
first coherent thought.

Miss Whitmore's soul burned with resentment. No woman, even at twenty-
three, loves to be called "the old maid"--especially by a keen-witted
young man with square chin and lips with a pronounced curve to them.
And whoever supposed the fellow could draw like that--and notice every
tiny little detail without really looking once? Of course, she knew