Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/258

256 was cruel. You knew he was married to Pauline's mother first? Well, he was. A good trapper, you call him? I call him a bad lot."

She slapped the dough into one pan after the other, and set them aside to rise. There was not time for pause in this Mission life of the West.

"I can't make him pay, you know, Miss Chubb." Tempest glanced down at the little brown ball whose chubby fingers were rapidly making the white dough as brown. "But if I come across him I'll see what I can do. On the Reserve, is he?"

"Why, I suppose." Miss Chubb scraped the pan with a noisy knife. "He came to see Pauline yesterday, and got a good square meal for nothing. These Indians know how to time their meal-hours. And then he carried off a hunk of pie in his hat.

Tempest laughed and stood up.

"I will certainly remind him of that when I see him. Here are some visitors for your bale-room, Miss Chubb. Why—it looks like Grange's wife; but I don't know who's driving her"

"Oh, dear." Miss Chubb rubbed vigorously at her flour-caked arms. "Thanks be we probably won't wear clothes in Heaven, or I suppose someone would be set to the distribution job. Yes; it's Moosta. And she'll buy one pinafore, and talk for an hour about those wonderful pictures of Andree."

"Pictures of Andree?"

"Why" Miss Chubb looked at him. Then she went white. "It's nothing," she said. "Mr. Heriot has been sketching her, as he does everyone else, you know."

"Oh," said Tempest indifferently. "I see. I just hadn't thought of it."

He made his good-bye cheerfully, and Miss Chubb never guessed at the suspicion and the fierce jealously which quickened into concrete fear at her words. But she looked after him as the tinkling sleigh slid over the white ground, and her eyes were tender and pitying.

"There's a good man spoiled," she said. "Unless Dick Heriot has put a spoke in his wheel. And I don't know if that will mend matters much."