We had tea, of course, and after Jerry had gone to bed and Sandy had lain down with his chops on the floor between his paws and his tail thumping the boards occasionally in approbation Jack got out our much worn deck of cards and we initiated Mrs. Alton into the mysteries of pedro. With a beginner's luck she and Jack were much too successful for Jean and me, and when it was time for us to go we insisted that she must visit Fourteen some night soon and give us a chance to return the drubbing. "I should _so_ like to, but I can't leave Jerry," Mrs. Alton explained. "But Jerry must come, too," we countered. "Jerry and Sandy, and, if necessary, the cow and the chickens. Now you simply must, or some night we will come over and kidnap you by force." But Mrs. Alton would give us no definite answer. There was no such hesitation at Jake's. Jake met us in the yard, hatless, coatless, vestless, although the temperature was flirting with the freezing point. "Welcome, Sittin' Crow!" he exclaimed. "And all the other little crows. I suppose you've come to condole with me in my affliction?" "What affliction?" we inquired, half misled by Jake's manner, for he was an expert in simulation. "She's inside--an' in possession. It's fort'nate fer me this country runs so much to outside, fer that's all I've any claim on." But by this time Jake's wife appeared in the door. "Come on in, girls," she cried, "and never mind that blatherskite. He goes around half dressed, keeping himself warm thinking up nonsense. I tell him some day he'll freeze his hair, and that's his finish, for I won't stay married to a bald man, whatever happens." "Tut, tut," returned her spouse. "Where Bella Donna is put, she stays. That's her strong point." It was an afternoon of much badinage we spent at Jake's, but under the surface there were evidences that our former land guide regarded his wife with a sort of awe which he tried to obscure from public view by a smoke screen of raillery. Bella, it was apparent, was a woman of character, and although Jake could scarcely be described as plastic in her hands, his recasting was only the harder on him on that account. He was in the mills of the gods, and they proposed to make a job of it. "I don' know whether she'll make me a good wife or not," he confided in me, "but I reckon she's set on makin' me a good husband." But Bella's house was clean, and Bella's table was well set, as pioneer tables go, and Bella was a living concentration of energy such as Jake needed to spur him into purposeful activity. It was Jake's weakness that he would drop a job any day to perpetrate a joke. "He thinks he's a joker," said Bella, acidly, anent this characteristic of her husband, "whereas he's only a joke. There's a big difference." "I admit the joke's on me," Jake returned meekly. "I should never ha' showed that telegram."