"Aren't you going to give us up?" asked one of the men.

"Not if you've any sense at all."

"Then I guess there's no use us talking things over. And if the young lady is a fairy, we'd be obliged if she'd get busy along the lines you've just laid down."

All eyes were turned on Maud. And she looked appealingly from Colonel Meredith to Mr. Jonstone and back again.

"What ought I to say? What ought I to promise? Can the money be returned? Can the police be called off? And if I only had some work to give them, but over at The Camp—"

"Every good fairy," said Colonel Meredith, "has two helpers to whom all things are possible."

"Truly?"

The Carolinians sprang to their feet, clicked their heels together into the first position of dancing, laid their right hands over their hearts, and bowed very low.

"Then," said Maud laughing, "I should like the money to be returned."

"I will attend to that," said Colonel Meredith.

"And the police to be called off."

Again the soldier assumed responsibility.

"But who," she asked, "will find work for them?"

"I will," said Mr. Jonstone. "They shall build the house for my cousin and me to live in. You can build a house, can't you? A log house?"

"But where will you build it?" asked Maud. "You found fault with all the best sites on the lake."

"The very first site we visited suited us to perfection."

"But you said the spring contained cyanide or something."

"We were talking through our hats."

"But why—"

The Carolinians gazed at her with a kind of beseeching ardor, until she understood that they had only found fault with one promising building site after another in order that they might pass the longest time possible in her company.

And she returned their glance with one in which there was some feeling stronger than mere amusement.

Chapter XXIV

*

Concerning information, Mark Twain wrote that it appeared to stew out of him naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. With the narrator of this episodical history, however, things are very different. And just how the good fairy, Maud Darling, was enabled to keep her promises to the outlaws seems to him of no great moment. But the money was returned to the express company; the police were called off; and the four robbers, with the woman to cook for them, went to work at building a log house on the point of pines to be occupied in the near future by the Carolinians.

They were not sorry to have been turned from a life of sin. It is only when a life of sin is gilded, padded, and pleasant that people hate to turn from it. When virtue entails being rained on, starved, and hunted, it isn't a very pleasant way of life, either.

The face of the young female bandit lost its look of premature old age. She went about her work singing, and the humming of the kettle was her accompaniment. The four men looked the other men of the camp in the face and showed how to lay trees by the heels in record time. To their well-swung and even better-sharpened axes even the stems of oaks were as wax candles. It became quite "the thing" for guests at The Camp to go out to the point and admire the axe-work and all the processes of frontier house-building.