The Greater Power. Bindloss Harold

but he escaped from that dance with only a few abrasions, and, though he failed to obtain another with Laura, he contrived to enjoy himself. All his Bush friends were not primitive. Some of them had once played their parts in much more brilliant functions. They had cultivated tastes, and he had learned to recognize the strong points of those who had not. After all, kindly hearts count for much, and it was not unnatural that, like other exiles who have plodded up and down that rugged land, he should think highly of the hard-handed men and patient women who willingly offer a night’s shelter and a share of their dried apples, salt pork, and grindstone bread to the penniless wanderer.

      What was more to the purpose, a number of the guests at the dance had swung the axe by his side, and fought the river with him when the valley was filled with the roar of water.

      They had done their work gallantly, when it seemed out of the question that they would ever receive the money he had promised them, from sheer pride in their manhood, and to keep their word, and now they danced as determinedly.

      There are no cramping conventions and very few shams–and the shams in those forests, it must be confessed, are as a rule imported ones. In fact, there was that evening, among all those in the pulp-mill, only one man who seemed to disassociate himself from the general good-will. That man was Waynefleet. He wore his old velvet jacket as a cloak of superciliousness–or, at least, that was how it seemed to the Bush-ranchers, who recognized and resented an effete pride in the squeak of his very ancient lacquered shoes. It is possible that he did not mean to make himself in any way offensive, and merely desired to indicate that he was graciously willing to patronize their bucolic festivities. There would have been something almost pathetic in his carefully preserved dignity had it not been so obtrusively out of place; and when they stood watching him for a moment or two, Gordon expressed Nasmyth’s thoughts.

      “How a man of that kind ever came to be Laura Waynefleet’s father is more than I can figure out!” he said. “It’s a question that worries me every time I look at him. Guess she owes everything to her mother; and Mrs. Waynefleet must have been a mighty patient woman.”

      Nasmyth smiled, but Gordon went on reflectively: “You folks show your sense when you dump your freaks into this country,” he said. “It never seems to strike you that it’s a little rough on us. What’s the matter with men like Waynefleet is that you can’t teach them sense. I’d have told him what I thought of him once or twice when I saw the girl doing his work up at the ranch if I’d figured it would have made any impression.”

      “I expect it would have been useless,” remarked Nasmyth. “After all, I’m not sure that it’s exactly your business.”

      Gordon watched Laura Waynefleet as she swung through a waltz on the arm of a sinewy rancher, and his eyes softened curiously.

      “Only on the girl’s account,” he admitted. “I’m sorry for her. Stills the blamed old image isn’t actively unkind.”

      Then he saw the sudden contraction of Nasmyth’s face, and turned toward him. “Now,” he said, “I want you to understand this thing. If it would be any comfort to her, I’d let Miss Waynefleet wipe her boots on me, and in one way that’s about all I’m fit for. I know enough to realize that she’d never waste a moment thinking of a man like me, even if I hadn’t in another way done for myself already.”