There were Jim Buckley, Billy Knapp, Alfred and the doctor's family. The latter now included only the girl, whom Lafond had himself caused to be raised to young womanhood. Of the others, Jim Buckley and Alfred had long since left the country--Alfred for Arizona, where he had gone into cow punching; Buckley for Montana and Idaho, in whose mountains he was supposed to be prospecting. These two, then, were out of the way for the present. They would never be difficult to find, and in comparison with Billy they had held quite a secondary place at the time of the half-breed's molten state, before he had cooled into the fixed forms of his conduct of life. The reason for this throws not a little light on Lafond's character. The feminine streak in him hated Billy Knapp personally, simply because that individual was loud in talk, great in size, and blustering in manner. He could restrain his resentment against the bashful Alfred or the imperturbable Jim; but not that against a man who seemed always, to the high strung half-breed, the potential bully. He would have followed Billy Knapp to China, if necessary. But it so happened that that individual, after a checkered career, had settled down in the village or camp of Copper Creek, not forty miles from Lafond's headquarters at Rapid. Billy's vicissitudes were those of many of his class. Trained in the liberal give and take policy of the early frontier times, he found himself, on their ebb, stranded high and dry without appropriate means of progression. Billy was used to relying on his plainscraft, his courage, his skill with firearms, and his personal strength. Such qualities as economy, accuracy of estimate, frugality, and patience in the overcoming of abstractions would have been, to his early life, practically useless. He came to be a big-hearted, generous fellow, without the slightest idea of the value of money or the burden of debt. He was apt to be seized by many whims, which he was wont to gratify on the spot. "Know Billy Knapp?" ruminated an old plainsman once. "Billy Knapp? Seems to me I do; he's the feller that would buy the co't house yonder if he could get trusted for it, ain't he?" It described him. And as in the old days his prestige had depended on individual prowess of a rather spectacular order, it came about that Billy was just a little fond of strutting. He liked to play the patron, he liked to distribute favors, to treat to drinks, to stand as the representative of great unseen forces, whether of military power in the old days, or of extensive capital in these latter.