“Old Man Compton,” who had stampeded from his small farm in northern New York in the sixties to meet with little success in the mines, but more as a rancher, had been as typical a hayseed as ever punctuated politics with tobacco juice in front of a corner grocery-store, but had promised his wife on her death-bed that their son should have “schooling.” Mrs. Compton, who had arrived in Montana soon after the log house was built, was a large, dark, silent woman, whom none of her distant neighbours had ever claimed to know. It was currently believed in the New York village whence she came that in the early days of the eighteenth century the sturdy Verrooy stock had been abruptly crossed by the tribe of the Oneida. Ancient history in a new country is necessarily enveloped in mist, but although the children she had lost had been fair and nondescript like their father, her youngest, and her only son, possessed certain characteristics of the higher type of Indian. He was tall and lightly built, graceful, supple, swift of foot, with the soft tread of the panther; and although his skin was no darker than that of the average brunette, it acquired significance from the intense blackness of his hair, the thin aquiline nose, the long, narrow eyes, the severe and stolid dignity of expression even in his earlier years. He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction, particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a picnic and surrendered his heart. Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the “West Siders” whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine prudence dictated. Before she gave her hair its nightly brushing her bold unpedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with the legend, “Mrs. Gregory Compton,” the while she assured herself there was “no sweller name on West Broadway.” To do her justice, she also thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Although she longed to be a Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that her hour was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and blind her mate.