The cook, with commendable discretion, had slipped away quietly in the meanwhile, and the two young women, whom nobody had noticed, turned back among the firs.

The girl in the elaborate draperies laughed.
"I suppose it was a little brutal, and we shouldn't have stayed," she said.

"Still, in a sense the attitude of the one they called the Kid was rather fine.

I could have made quite a striking sketch of him." Ida Stirling made no direct reply to this, but, as she found afterward, the scene had fixed itself on her memory.

Still it was not the intent men or the stately clustering pines that she recalled most clearly; it was the dominant central figure, standing almost statuesque, with head tilted slightly backward, and both hands clenched on the big ax haft.
"The man they were tormenting must have done something to vex them.
They really are not quarrelsome," she said..