"Yes. When I wrote him a recent treatise entitled 'An Incident in a Hay Field, or, How about a Cheque for a Hundred Pounds'--you will remember the time--I covered the ragged edge of my purpose with a dissertation upon the prairie climate. I told him that it consisted of a melange of everything from Naples at its best to Norway at its worst--from sleepy kittens purring in the sun to wild she-tigers raging through the jungle. From climate I moved to grass by easy stages, and from grass to hay, and from hay to our little conflagration, and from that to the matter of one hundred pounds. On the way I explained that this part of the country is not really in the chinook belt, although occasionally one came down this far. So now I am commissioned to shoot for the Governor a young chinook. He thinks the skin would look a bit of all right on the library floor, don't you know?" "And of course you will shoot one?" "A request from one's immediate paternal ancestor, accompanied by a draft for a hundred pounds, is not to be lightly disregarded. We may have another fire some day, and the price of wagons may go still higher." "Let me think," said Jack, and for a few moments we remained silent to give his mind elbow-room. "I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed. "Has your Governor ever seen a badger?" "Not likely, except possibly at the Zoo." "We must take that chance. You must shoot a badger, Spoof, which we will formally christen a chinook, and send it to your Governor in time for Christmas." "I think it's just wicked to do that," said Jean, whose sympathies were always with the under dog. "No doubt Mr.--Mr. Spoof, senior, is a delightful old gentleman, and it isn't fair. Fancy some one from America visiting him and Mr. Spoof goes showing off the chinook which his son shot on the banks of the Saskatchewan. 'Chinook nothing!' says the visitor. 'That's a badger, as common as rabbits, almost, and I would describe your son as another prairie animal, smaller than a badger, with two stripes down its back.'" "Oh, listen to Miss Prim!" Marjorie interrupted. "Who would think she had a letter from her mother asking if she was canning any buffalo beans?" It was not until Spoof's tall form had dissolved out of view in the starlight that it occurred to me how skilfully he had changed the conversation from the subject of Mrs. Alton. It was something to think about. CHAPTER XIII. We did as Spoof suggested. Early the next afternoon we hitched Buck and Bright to the wagon and wended our slow way south-westward, Jack and I taking turns in the exclamatory exercises by means of which the oxen were kept in motion. The prairie now was very brown and bare, and only the more hardy gophers remained about to whistle saucily at our carry-all lumbering by. The dazzling sunshine seemed to have lost its force, and there was a presage of coming winter in the air. We dropped into silence save for the noises of our locomotion.