When the doctor told his daughter this he was a little triumphant. They had talked over Courant and his antecedents, and had some argument about them, the doctor maintaining that the strange man was a gentleman, Susan quite sure that he was not. Dr. Gillespie used the word in its old-fashioned sense, as a term having reference as much to birth and breeding as to manners and certain, ineradicable instincts. The gentleman adventurer was not unknown on the plains. Sometimes he had fled from a dark past, sometimes taken to the wild because the restraints of civilization pressed too hard upon the elbows of his liberty. "He's evidently of French Creole blood," said the doctor. "Many of those people who came up from New Orleans and settled in St. Louis were of high family and station." "Then why should he be out here, dressed like an Indian and wandering round with all sorts of waifs and strays? I believe he's just the same kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does come from educated people, there's something wrong about him, and he's had to come out here and hide." "Oh, what a suspicious little Missy! Nothing would make me believe that. He may be rough, but he's not crooked. Those steady, straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an honest man. No, my dear, there's no discreditable past behind him, and he's a gentleman." "Rubbish!" she said pettishly. "You'll be saying Leff's a gentleman next." From which it will be seen that Low Courant had not been communicative about himself. Such broken scraps of information as he had dropped, when pieced together made a scanty narrative. His grandfather had been one of the early French settlers of St. Louis, and his father a prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young--thirty perhaps--it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years. He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke the language of the Black Feet and Crows. He had passed a winter in the old Spanish town of Santa Fe, and from there joined a regiment of United States troops and done his share of fighting in the Mexican War. Now the wanderlust was on him, he was going to California. "Maybe to settle," he told the doctor. "If I don't wake up some morning and feel the need to move once more." When they reached the fort he was hailed joyously by the bourgeois himself. The men clustered about him, and there were loud-voiced greetings and much questioning, a rumor having filtered to his old stamping ground that he had been killed in the siege of the Alamo. The doctor told the bourgeois that Courant was to go with his train to California, and the apple-cheeked factor grinned and raised his eyebrows: "Vous avez de la chance! He's a good guide. Even Kit Carson, who conducted the General Fremont, is no better."