danger from rocks that really lay far below the surface. We could only travel as fast as the current, but that carried us along at racing speed, and as we swept over the clear depths we again felt, as on Crooked River, the sensation of flying. The play of light on the gorgeously colored boulders which formed the bottom added greatly to the pleasure and novelty of the ride.

Though the swells dashed repeatedly over our craft, we experienced little sense of danger. Was not each moment bringing us nearer the coveted pot of jam? The most ticklish moment came when we neared a long chute down which the river plunged at tremendous speed. We could see the rocks as distinctly as if there had been no water there, and doubted whether our craft would find clearance, but we headed her straight in and shot through without a scratch.

A few miles below the starting-point the walls of the canyon fell away, and on the left bank we saw the "Irish Cabin," a deserted shack built by a trapper a few years before. From this point onward the left bank is a continuous low flat as far as the Fox River Mountains. On the right hand the mountains continue much farther down, and around the head of Bower Creek, a swift stream that empties into the Finlay a couple of miles below Irish Cabin, there are some fine elevations that look as if they might be good for both sheep and caribou. If we had had our canoe and supplies at the mouth of this creek, I would have examined this country for a few days, but as it was we drifted by without stopping.

Below Bower Creek the river slowed down somewhat, but kept up a good pace everywhere, especially at the ripples. The mountains on the right hand now fell behind, while the Fox River range began to loom nearer. We could see this range,

the scene of earlier trials, for a long distance, and its bunch-grass-covered slopes, its ragged black peaks, and the golden mantle of frost-touched aspens that clothed its foot-hills made up a splendid spectacle. This range has thus far received no name. I should very much like to see it called the Joffre Range-after a very noble Frenchman-and have so set it down upon the maps.

From this point of vantage it was clear that we had climbed the range at about the worst place possible, and that if we had ascended the river a few miles farther, we would have had a much easier climb and would have saved about a day of hard labor. But such is one of the penalties of penetrating a strange country without a guide. It was evident that the Indians took advantage of this shorter route to reach both the mountains and some good moose-ponds that lay between the mountains and the Finlay, for we saw several old cache scaffoldings.

When the sun set we were still miles from the steep slope of Prairie Mountain and the narrow gap through which the Finlay breaks its way to the great intermontane valley; we were both chilled to the bone, for the night was turning cold, but we were too near our goal to stop now; just as the last feeble rays of light faintly crimsoned the white tops of the Kitchener Range behind us we swept through a final stretch of swift water and grounded our raft on the gravel bar beneath our cache. We had floated twenty-three miles in a little more than three hours.

My first act was to leap ashore and run to the hiding-place of our canoe, and I felt relieved to find it safe. Pack-rats had been meddling with the cache, but the jam was still intact. It did not remain intact long!

Next morning we again took the homeward way.

ARRIVED in Santacruz in the early evening, and as I stepped out of the carriage with the children the majordomo came rushing out from under the hotel portales and said: "Meesus Trench, is it? Your suite awaits, madam. The Lieutenant Trench from the American warship has ordered, madam."

There was a girl, not too young, sitting over at a small table, and at the name Trench, pronounced in the round voice of the majordomo, she-well, she was sitting by herself, smoking a cigarette, and I did not know why she should smile and look at me in just that way, I mean. But I can muster some poise of manner myself when I choose-I looked at her. And she looked me over, and smiled again. And I did not like that smile. It was as if as Ned would say she had something on me.

She and I were to be enemies-already I saw that. She was making smoke rings, and she never hurried the making of a single one of them as she looked at me; nor did I hurry a particle the ushering of the two children and the maid through the portales. But I did ask, after I had greeted Nan and her mother inside: "Auntie-or you, Nan-who is the oleander blossom smoking the cigarette out under the portales?'

It spoke volumes to me that Nan and her mother, without looking, at once knew whom I meant. She was the Carmen Whiffle of whom nearly every other American woman waiting to be taken home on the next transport had been whispering and not always whispering for weeks in Santacruz.

Nan, of course, had a good word for her. Is there a living creature on earth she wouldn't? "I think she is wonderfully good-looking," said Nan.

"No woman with a jaw like that," said Nan's mother, "can be good-looking.

And she sat at the piano there early this evening and raved over the 'Melody in F'; but when she tried to play it, it was with fingers of wood. What she really did play with spirit, Nettie-when she thought there were none of us American women around to hear her-was: 'I Want What I Want When I Want It.""

Auntie went on to tell then how this creature was a divorcée who had married an oil millionaire, and within six months got her divorce and a half-million alimony out of him. And she was born-not Carmen, but Hannah! "Now, what's the psychology, Nettie," said auntie, "of a woman who changes her name from Hannah to Carmen? If I had a husband within a thousand miles of her, I'd lock him up."

You may understand from the foregoing that Mrs. Wedner-Nan's mother -is a woman of convictions; and so she is. The Lady with the Wallop is what Ned tells me the men folks call her. But I am not without convictions myself.

"I have a husband within a thousand miles of her," I said, "and if you mean that for me, auntie, I won't lock him up— not even if he were the to-be-locked-up kind. When I can't hold my man, auntie, against any specimen of her species, I won't call in the police to help me. And I think I'll give her another look-over before the evening is ended."

"Don't bother your head with her," said auntie. "And sit down and have something to eat." And we did have something to eat, but up-stairs in my suite.

The children and I were eating, and Nan and auntie were giving me all the gossip since I'd seen them last, when the maid came in to say that the trunk with the children's things in it hadn't been sent up with the others. There's no use leaving such things to a maid in those countries-I went down to see about it myself; and there it was as I expected,

lying in the lobby where a lazy porter hadn't yet got around to it.

I told the fat majordomo a thing or two, and the trunk was soon on its upward way; and then as I was downstairs-I thought to take a glance about to see if anybody I knew had arrived in the meantime. You must remember that American refugees were arriving from the interior on every train, the revolutionary general Podesta being expected to enter the city almost any day-or hour.

I saw the back of a man's head, and I said to myself: "If that isn't as near Larry Trench's head as anything on earth can be!"-the shapely, overhanging back head and the uncrushable hair that went with it. There was a row of palmettos in tubs, and I walked around to make certain. It was Larry. And he was with a young woman. And the young woman was Carmen Whiffle, and her heavylashed agate eyes were gazing into the steady, deep-set, blue-green eyes of Larry. One look was all I needed to know what that lady's intentions were in the present case. "So!" I said to myself "that's what you meant when you smiled at the name Trench? Perhaps you thought Larry was my husband!”

Now, I hadn't seen a single officer or man of our ships on my way from the station, nor while I had been down-stairs with Nan and auntie earlier. Which was significant in itself, for a fleet of our battleships were anchored in the harbor, my Ned's among them. I looked around now. No, there wasn't one officer of ours in the dining-room, nor in the plaza outside. So what was Larry, a young officer of our marine corps, doing all by himself ashore?

And Larry was my Ned's young brother and my own little Neddo's godfather, and long ago I had decided that Larry should marry my own chum and cousin Nan, the very best girl that ever lived. And-well, if ever a woman looked like the newspaper photographs of the other woman of a dozen celebrated cases, Carmen Whiffle was that woman.

I stood there at the end of that row of palmettos, hesitating; and while I hesitated the orchestra struck up, and I saw the lady lead Larry out for a dance.

I did not have to see Carmen Whiffle

dance to know that she could dance. If they never learn to do anything else on earth, women of her kind do learn to dance. All women who have men on their minds learn to dance. She could dance. If I had never seen her lift a toe off the floor, the lines of her figure were there to prove that she could dance. But she lifted her toe. More than her toe. She danced-I have to give her credit for itwith grace; and after she warmed up to it, not only with grace but with abandon; with so much abandon that all the other women who were trying to dance with abandon ceased their feeble efforts and stood against the wall to watch her.

After that dance Carmen Whiffle never had another chance with me. I almost ran up to my room. Little Anna was already asleep; but Neddo, aged six, was wide-awake. Nan and her mother had gone to their room, which was across the hall on the same floor.

"Neddo, dear, do you know your uncle Larry is down-stairs?" I asked him.

"Oh-h, mummie!" he cried, and came leaping out of his cot bed. "I must see him, mummie!”

"I'm going to let you go down-stairs all by yourself, Neddo, and see him. And then be sure to bring him up here, to have a look at sister. And then be sure to take him to the balcony at the end of the hallway and tell him to draw the lattices and wait there. It's to be a surprise, Neddo, tell him; but not a single word more than that."

I waited two minutes or so, and then followed Neddo. I was in time to see Neddo throw himself at Larry, and wrap his arms around his neck and smother him with kisses. "Uncle Larry! O Uncle Larry! Come and see who's up-stairs! No telling, you know!"

From where I was, on the screened balcony overlooking the lounging-room, I needed no ship's spy-glass to read the suspicion in Carmen Whiffle's eyes when she looked at little Neddo. I do believe she could even suspect that innocent, affectionate child with playing a game. And the tears came into Larry's eyes.

"My godson, my brother's boy," explained Larry. "If you don't mind my running away for a few minutes, Miss Whiffle, I'll hurry back. I'll explain to

Neddo's mother that you are waiting and hurry right back."

"Don't explain anything," said Miss Whiffle, just a bit tartly. "Never mind any explaining, but come back as soon as you can. I shall be waiting here."

Are you at all given to the habit of fancying in human beings the resemblance to different kinds of birds and beasts? Looking down on Carmen Whiffle just then, I could see where, if her well-cushioned features were chiselled away, she would look startlingly like a hawk.

I may be unjust, I know, but I was thinking of more than one thing just then. I was thinking of what I read in Carmen Whiffle's glance and smile at me when I passed under the portales of that hotel that evening. A devoted, slavish wife and mother was what she was thinking I was; and possibly I am. But women of her kind are altogether too quick to think that the devoted wife and mother hasn't any brains.

And more than all the brains in the world is the wisdom that comes of knowing men. Carmen Whiffle may have known several men in her day; but if she did it was to know them incompletely; and to know any number of men incompletely is never truly to know any one, while to know one man well is to know many. And when that one in my case was Larry's own brother, why, I wasn't worrying over a battle with Carmen Whiffle, superbly equipped though she doubtless thought herself.

Ned and his brother Larry were natively pretty much alike; but my Ned was trained early in a rigid profession and early assumed the responsibilities of marriage and a home; and he told me so more than once-so saved himself more than one drift to leeward. It is no gain for us women to dodge facts in this life. To a man with a conscience, a wife and two children are better than many windward anchors, as Ned would say. Larry was Ned, minus the wife and two children, and plus a little more of youth and the not yet, perhaps, disciplined Trench temperament.

And for every child a woman bears mark her up a decade of years in human wisdom. And twice a decade in hardening resolution. It had already become

marble in me—my resolution to save from the talons of this hawk this brother of my Ned's-a twenty-five-year-old man of war according to stupid bureau files, but in reality a little child playing in the garden of life with never a thought of any bird of prey hovering in the air above him.

I watched Larry go bounding up the wide staircase with Neddo, and then I waited long enough for them to get well out of sight ahead; and for Neddo to lead his uncle up the second flight, to show him baby in her bed asleep; and Larry-I could picture him-time to stoop over and kiss the dear, warm, plump little face.

"And now you must hide-I'll show you, Uncle Larry-till mummie comes," said Neddo, and led him back to the hall and onto the balcony, which looked down on the patio of the hotel. And there Neddo left him, after closing him in behind the lattice, as I had told him.

I then went to get Nan, who had been sentenced to read her mother to sleep with something out of Trollope. Nan's mother carried volumes of Trollope with her as other women carry hot-water bottles. Twenty minutes of dear old Trollope and she was good for her eight hours' sleep, she would say, as she did now; but this time without keeping Nan twenty minutes.

"Nettie, the way you go around commandeering people, you ought to be a general in the army," said auntie, but with perfect good nature. "Go along with her, Nan."

I led Nan to where Neddo was waiting in his crib. "Did you tell Cousin Nan yet, mummie?" asked Neddo in what he thought was a whisper.

"Tell me what, Neddo?" asked Nan. "Neddo!" I said, and raised a finger. "Sh-h, Neddo!" and Neddo sh-h-d, and I led Nan into the hall. "I'm dying to have a talk with you," I whispered to Nan-"out here, where Neddo won't be kept awake and the maid won't hear us."

And so, just when Larry was thinking of breaking out of his hiding-place, he heard a door in the hall open, and through the slats of the lattice saw two women's shadowy forms tiptoeing down the hall toward his balcony.

Nan went straight to the lattice. "Let's let the air in, Nettie."