Amos Wickliff little suspected himself riding, that sunny afternoon, towards the ghastliest adventure of an adventurous life. Nevertheless, he was ill at ease. His horse was too light for his big muscles and his six feet two of bone. Being a merciful man to beasts, he could not ride beyond a jog-trot, and his soul was fretted by the delay. He cast a scowl down the dejected neck of the pony to its mournful, mismated ears, and from thence back at his own long legs, which nearly scraped the ground. “O Lord! ain’t I a mark on this horse!” he groaned. “We could make money in a circus!” With a gurgle of disgust he looked about him at the glaring blue sky, at the measureless, melancholy sweep of purple and dun prairie. “Well, give _me_ Iowa!” said Amos. For a long while he rode in silence, but his thoughts were distinct enough for words. “What an amusing little scamp it was!”—thus they ran—“I believe he could mimic anything on earth. He used to give a cat and puppy fighting that I laughed myself nearly into a fit over. When I think of that I hate this job. Now why? You never saw the fellow to speak to him more than twice. Duty, Amos, duty. But if he is as decent as he’s got the name of being here, it’s rough—Hullo! River? Trees?” The river might be no more than the lightening rim of the horizon behind the foliage, but there was no mistake about the trees; and when Wickliff turned the field-glass, which he habitually carried, on them he could make out not only the river and the willows, but the walls of a cabin and the lovely undulations of a green field of corn. Half an hour’s riding brought him to the house and a humble little garden of sweet-pease and hollyhocks. Amos groaned. “How cursed decent it all looks! And flowers too! I have no doubt that his wife’s a nice woman, and the baby has a clean face. Everything certainly does combine to ball me up on this job! There she is; and she’s nice!” A woman in a clean print gown, with a child pulling at her skirt, had run to the gate. She looked young. Her freckled face was not exactly pretty, but there was something engaging in the flash of her white teeth and her soft, black-lashed, dark eyes. She held the gate wide open, with the hospitality of the West. “Won’t you ’light, stranger?” she called. “I’m bound for here,” replied Amos, telling his prepared tale glibly. “This is Mr. Brown’s, the photographer’s, ain’t it? I want him to come to the settlement with me and take me standing on a deer.” “Yes, sir.” The woman spoke in mellow Southern accents, and she began to look interested, as suspecting a romance under this vain-glory. “Yes, sir. Deer you shot, I reckon. I’ll send Johnny D. for him. Oh, Johnny D.!” A lath of a boy of ten, with sunburnt white hair and bright eyes, vaulted over a fence and ran to her, receiving her directions to go find uncle after he had cared for the gentleman’s horse. “Your nephew, madam?” said Amos, as the lad’s bare soles twinkled in the air.