The sunlight was streaming into the room when sounds on the trail aroused him. He awoke with a start. His first glance was at the boy who was still sleeping. Then he arose and walked to the door. Four men were cautiously approaching the house, while a fifth held the horses of the party. Mr. Rathburn recognized the sheriff of Arapahoe County and his deputies, and his hand stole beneath the tails of his long English coat. Then he remembered the sleeping boy upon the cot. Mr. Rathburn stepped into the yard. “Don't shoot,” he said softly, “I give myself up.” MISS CAXTON'. FATHER IF Miss Caxton's father had been called on to give a detailed account of Miss Caxton's life, he would have described it as a perpetual round of gaiety. By what process of reasoning he arrived at any such conclusion is known only to himself; but from out the depths of his ignorance this belief had sprung, and it bore fruit in an inclination to curtail any pleasure other than the purely domestic in which Miss Caxton might have desired to indulge. It was his custom to observe that if one had a good home, that home was decidedly the best place for one, and on occasions when he knew Miss Caxton was desirous of spending an evening out, it was his wont to introduce this statement at the supper table, as the moral to sundry fables. Likewise he manufactured numerous fictitious conversations supposed to have taken place between himself and others, in which Miss Caxton was held up as a shining example of domesticity; then he would light his cigar and saunter downtown to play at whist until a late hour of the night. That there was anything incongruous in his conduct or any discrepancy between his words and his acts never occurred to him. Once, when Miss Caxton ventured to point out this apparent difference in word and deed, he had explained that the noise the children made wore upon his nerves—but he was quite sure that no man loved his home more than he did, and that when Thaddeus, Roderick and Leander, the twin, grew up and attained a decent age, he would greatly enjoy spending an evening now and then with his family. Nothing could have induced him to believe that the noise wore upon Miss Caxton's nerves. He knew very well that women liked that sort of thing immensely. He was not a man of imaginative temperament, or he might have wondered what he would have done had there been no elder sister to look after the children when Miss Caxton's mother followed the youthful Leander's mate out of this world. If this thought ever gained a place in his mind, he had put it aside with the convincing argument that in supplying the little boys with an elder sister he had placed himself beyond reproach. Miss Caxton was a living proof of that forethought that marked the serious operations of his life; nor was Miss Caxton overlooked in this happy adjustment; she had Thaddeus and Roderick, not to mention the twin—and even half a twin was better than no twin at all.