of keeping the camp in ignorance until the start had actually been made, each one of which was laughed to scorn by the practical Jim.
"She might put on men's clothes," he concluded desperately.
"For the love of God, what for?" inquired Jim. "Stick to sense, Billy. Besides, there's the kid."
Billy tried once more.
"They might meet us 'bout a hundred mile out. He could take Jim's schooner, here, and mosey out nor'-west, and then jest nat'rally pick us up after we gets good and started. That way, the camp thinks he palavers with Jim and us to get a schooner, and maybe they thinks Jim is a damn fool a whole lot, but Jim don't mind that; do you, Jim?"
"No, I don't mind that," said Jim, "but yore scheme's no good."
"Why?"
"He wouldn't get ten mile before somebody'd hold him up and lift his schooner off him. They's a raft of bad men jest layin' fer a chance like that to turn road agent."
Billy turned a slow brick-red, and got up suddenly, overturning the coffee-pot. A dozen strides brought him to the camp of the Tennessee outfit. There he raised his voice to concert pitch.
"We aims to pull out day arter to-morrow," he bellowed. "We also aims to take with us two tenderfeet, a woman, and a kid. Them that has objections can go to the devil."
So saying, he turned abruptly on his heel and returned to his friends. Jim whistled; but Alfred smiled softly, and began to recap the nipples of his old-fashioned Colt's revolvers. Alfred was at that time the best shot with a six-shooter in the middle West.
Seeing this, Billy's frown relaxed into a grin.
"I'm thinkin' that them that does object probably will go to the devil," said he.
In half an hour the news was all over camp. When Michaïl Lafond heard of it, he left his dinner half eaten and went out to talk earnestly to a great variety of people.
III
THE MAN WHO STOOD "99"
The three scouts would never have been able to explain satisfactorily their reasons for being so easily persuaded, or their obstinacy in adhering to the determination so suddenly made. Prue Welch would have thanked a divine providence for it. The doctor, her husband, took it as quite in the natural course of events.
He was a queer man, the doctor, a pathetic little figure in the world's progress—an outgrowth of it, in a certain way of thinking.
Born of good old New England stock, he spent his studious, hard-working boyhood on a farm. At sixteen he went to the high school, where he was adored by his teachers because he stood ninety-nine in algebra. Inconsequently, but inevitably, this rendered him shy in the presence of girls, and unwarrantably conscious of his hands and feet. So, when he went to college, he spent much time in the library, more in the laboratory, and none at all in the elemental little chaos of a world that can do so much for the wearers of queer clothes and queerer habits of thought. He graduated, a spectacled grind, bowed of shoulder, straight of hair, earnest of thought.
Much reading of abstract speculation had developed in him a reverence for the impractical that amounted almost to obsession. Given a bit of useless information and a chunk of solid wisdom, he would at once bestow his preference on the former, provided, always, it were theoretical enough. He knew the dips of strata from their premonitary surface wiggles to their final plunges into unknown and heated depths. He could deliver to you a cross-section of your pasture lot, streaked like the wind-clouds of early winter; and he could explain it in the most technical language. Nothing rock-ribbed and ancient escaped him in his frequent walks. He saw everything—except, perchance, the beauty that clothes the rock-ribbed and ancient as a delicate aura, invisible to the eye of science—and he labelled what he saw, and ticketed it away in the pigeon-holes of his many-chambered mind, where he could put his finger on it at any given moment in the easiest fashion in the world.
It is very pleasant to know where the Paleozoic has faulted, and how; or why the stratifications of the ice age do not show glacial scorings in certain New England localities. To verify in regard to lamination green volumes of obese proportions, or to recognize the projection into the geological physical world of the thought of a master, this is fine, is noble; this makes to glow the kindly light in spectacled blue eyes.
Adoniram Welch left college with many honors. He returned to his little New England village, and for a space was looked upon as a local celebrity. This is a bad thing for most youths, but Adoniram it affected not at all. It availed only to draw upon him, in sweet contemplation, another pair of blue eyes, womanly, serious blue eyes, under a tangle of curly golden hair.
And so, although Prue Welch was a homely name, and Prue Winterborne a beautiful one, when Adoniram accepted the chair of geology offered him by his alma mater, the owner of the blue eyes went with him, and the new professor's thick spectacles somehow glowed with a kindly warmth, which even fine specimens of the finest fossils had never been able to kindle. He settled down into a little white house, in a little blossomy "yard," under a very big, motherly elm, and gave his days to the earnest mental dissection of the cuticle of the globe. His wife attacked the problem of life on six hundred dollars a year.
Now, from this state of affairs sprang two results. The professor evolved a theory, and Mrs. Professor, although she did not in the least understand what it was all about, came to believe in it, to champion it, to consider it quite the most important affair of the age. The professor thought so, too; and so they were happy and united.
The theory was a tremendous affair, having to do with nothing less than the formation of our continent. It was revolutionary in the extreme, but shed such illumination in hitherto dark corners of this and allied subjects that its probability, prima facie, was practically assured. To Prue Welch it seemed to be quite so; but the inexorable eye of science discerned breaks in the chain of continuity, gaps in the procession of proofs, which, while not of vast importance in a specious argument designed to furnish with peptonized intellectual pabulum the more frivolous-minded layman, nevertheless sufficed to destroy utterly its worth as a serious hypothesis. These breaks, the professor explained, could never be filled except by actual field-work. The proper field, he assured her, was the country of the Black Hills of South Dakota, then as distant as the antipodes. He proved this scientifically. Prue agreed, but did not understand. A number of years later she did understand, from hearing Billy Knapp joking with Alfred.
"These yar hills," said Billy, "was made last. The Lo'd had a little of everything left when he'd finished the rest, so he chucked it down on the prairie, an' called it the Black Hills."
However, the mere fact of her comprehension mattered not one iota. If Adoniram said a thing was so, to Prue its truth at once became age-old.
So it happened that the great theory hung fire wofully, and the country of their dreams came to lie beyond the frontier wilderness, whose tide was but just beginning to ebb back from the pine woods of Wisconsin and the oak openings of Illinois. This was finality. What lay beyond they did not trouble to inquire. The professor sighed the sigh of patient abnegation. The professor's wife believed, with beautiful trust, that a divine providence would provide, and that with the earth-wide fame that must accrue to the author of New World Erosions would come added opportunity for added reputation.
For
