“I know this story very well,” said Paul, “and yet I never heard it but once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word was bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid that is a romantic theory of the Western man. “That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire, father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him. He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering was the same. “Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun, and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood, without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch. “The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always men, on the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened--well, no matter--such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled at. She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between them. There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone; she conquered, but it nearly killed her.