“I told you, Jim! Elder, I smelt 'em from the moment we broke out of the hills.” He lifted the boy down as he spoke, and making a common movement with Jim, swung himself stiffly from the saddle; a half-grown boy had appeared from the direction of the corrals, and at a sign from Ephriam led away the mules. “Are there no more of your party coming?” said the old man. “What's left of us is right heah, elder,” answered the Missourian; then he saw that Ephriam was regarding Benny curiously. “Oh, him? You allow he don't belong to either Jim or me—and you're right, elder, for he don't.” Ephriam turned on him with unexpected sternness at this. “Perhaps that is your excuse for his condition!” and he pointed to the child, whose white, scared face wore a preternatural look of age and suffering; and whose tattered clothes scarcely covered his pinched little body; while his hands and bare feet were cruelly torn and bruised. “Well, sir, I admit he ain't much to brag on, and his looks is a scandal to this outfit. We picked him up only four days back; he says he'd run off from the redskins. He'd most starved to death.” His own gaunt frame and hollow cheeks, however, told plainly of the hardships all had endured, and lack of food had not been the least of these. Ephriam's face softened. “Yes,” he said, in apology for his momentary suspicion, “I can see you have suffered.” “But you have got a fine climate, elder,” broke in the Missourian, bent on being conciliatory. “Jim and me noticed that right along. This is the place to come for climate; there's nothing else heah to take your mind off it; it's heah thick.” But Ephriam's glance had gone back to the child. “Poor little fellow! Some emigrant's boy, probably.” Benny looked up quickly into his face and stole to his side. Whatever those first suspicions of his concerning Jim and the Missourian they had in no wise abated; all their kindness had not altered his doubt of them. The questions they had asked him, but more than all their strange and to him utterly incomprehensible knowledge of so much that had taken place on that hill, had bred conviction in his brain. He hated and feared them. “Seems to fancy you, elder,” said the Missourian. “We certainly done what we could for him, which ain't saying much, for we'd liked to do a heap more.” A young girl appeared in the doorway; the Missourian turned quickly, hearing her light step, and swept off his battered hat with an elaborate flourish. “Ma'am,” he said. Jim, by a casual gesture, brushed the flapping brim that shaded his eyes; he was speechless. “If you will come in, dinner is on the table, father,” said the girl. She had outgrown all curiosity concerning these wayfarers from the States; yet she gave the Missourian a smile, and to him that smile was an event.