Sometimes Doren rode with him on a gentle pony. Hope Bragdon’s austerity softened before his kindness to the boy and she grew to look for Steven, her face lighting at his approach. Hope Bragdon’s life so far had not departed from the hard and sterile traditions of her New England heritage. She was used to enduring, to going without, to repressing any desire that might be regarded as an indulgence. Even her passionate love for the little brother whom her mother had thrust into her tiny arms when she lay dying had to be curbed. But it only burned the more fiercely for that. If she petted him when as a little fellow he ran crying to her with a hurt, it only earned him a slap or a harsh reproof. The tiring round of household tasks left Hope with little enthusiasm; her nature reflected the cold, repressed, dreary outlook of her life. Steven felt this lack of grace and did not realize why it was or notice that her face did lighten when he dropped by to talk, because she invariably became more repressed and unresponsive. Yet as the caravan halted on that last night before they made the Fort the two blond young people stood talking for a moment in the shafts of the late afternoon sun. St. Vrain eyed them shrewdly, and later, pulling at his pipe, he spoke unexpectedly: “I wish you’d marry her, lad. It’s not safe for a woman like that to be in this country loose like. French trapper’s likely to stride up when we make the Fort and offer her father a couple of hundred fox or beaver, and some horses thrown in, for her, and from what I’ve seen of the old man he’s likely to take it--and hand her over.” Steven was aghast; then he smiled weakly. “You will have your jest, Colonel Ceran. I have no thought of maids or matrimony yet. I am not eighteen.” “_Non!_” the colonel was surprised. “_Est-ce possible?_ There is plenty of time, true, before thee. But wait till you get to the Fort”--he tapped down the tobacco in his red Indian pipe--“you will see something more of this land, of this life of men and beasts on the frontier. You will see the kind of women to which the men become accustomed, also. And you will see something of trading, real trading.” Twenty-four hours later they rounded a curve in the river bank and came upon the new Fort, begun just the year before, and scarcely more than a third finished now. All about the heavy walls of the main building were pitched dozens of tents, made of buffalo skins, or deerhide stretched over saplings for the briefest sort of shelter. Blanketed Indians, fringed trappers, a duke in fustian who turned out to be Colonel Bent himself, turned the encampment into a busy community.