They resumed their places with awed looks. The master examined the book. It was a little Spanish prayer book. “You were reading this?” he said in her own tongue.

“Yes. You shall not prevent me!” she burst out. “Mother of God! THEY will not let me read it at the ranch. They would take it from me. And now YOU!”

“You may read it when and where you like, except when you should be studying your lessons,” returned the master quietly. “You may keep it here in your desk and peruse it at recess. Come to me for it then. You are not fit to read it now.”

The girl looked up with astounded eyes, which in the capriciousness of her passionate nature the next moment filled with tears. Then dropping on her knees she caught the master’s bitten hand and covered it with tears and kisses. But he quietly disengaged it and lifted her to her seat. There was a sniffling sound among the benches, which, however, quickly subsided as he glanced around the room, and the incident ended.

Regularly thereafter she took her prayer book back at recess and disappeared with the children, finding, as he afterwards learned, a seat under a secluded buckeye tree, where she was not disturbed by them until her orisons were concluded. The children must have remained loyal to some command of hers, for the incident and this custom were never told out of school, and the master did not consider it his duty to inform Mr. or Mrs. Hoover. If the child could recognize some check—even if it were deemed by some a superstitious one—over her capricious and precocious nature, why should he interfere?

One day at recess he presently became conscious of the ceasing of those small voices in the woods around the schoolhouse, which were always as familiar and pleasant to him in his seclusion as the song of their playfellows—the birds themselves. The continued silence at last awakened his concern and curiosity. He had seldom intruded upon or participated in their games or amusements, remembering when a boy himself the heavy incompatibility of the best intentioned adult intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger’s pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little hollow among the sycamores, where the children were disposed in a ring, in the centre of which, with a handkerchief in each hand, Concha the melancholy!—Concha the devout!—was dancing that most extravagant feat of the fandango—the audacious sembicuaca!

Yet, in spite of her rude and uncertain accompaniment, she was dancing it with a grace, precision, and lightness that was wonderful; in spite of its doubtful poses and seductive languors she was dancing it with the artless gayety and innocence—perhaps from the suggestion of her tiny figure—of a mere child among an audience of children. Dancing it alone she assumed the parts of the man and woman; advancing, retreating, coquetting, rejecting, coyly bewitching, and at last yielding as lightly and as immaterially as the flickering shadows that fell upon them from the waving trees overhead. The master was fascinated yet troubled. What if there had been older spectators? Would the parents take the performance as innocently as the performer and her little audience? He thought it necessary later to suggest this delicately to the child. Her temper rose, her eyes flashed.

“Ah, the slipper, she is forbidden. The prayer book—she must not. The dance, it is not good. Truly, there is nothing.”

For several days she sulked. One morning she did not come to school, nor the next. At the close of the third day the master called at the Hoovers’ ranch.

Mrs. Hoover met him embarrassedly in the hall. “I was sayin’ to Hiram he ought to tell ye, but he didn’t like to till it was certain. Concha’s gone.”

“Gone?” echoed the master.

“Yes. Run off with Pedro. Married to him yesterday by the Popish priest at the mission.”

“Married! That child?”

“She wasn’t no child, Mr. Brooks. We were deceived. My brother was a fool, and men don’t understand these things. She was a grown woman—accordin’ to these folks’ ways and ages—when she kem here. And that’s what bothered me.”

There was a week’s excitement at Chestnut Ridge, but it pleased the master to know that while the children grieved for the loss of Concha they never seemed to understand why she had gone.

DICK BOYLE’S BUSINESS CARD

The Sage Wood and Dead Flat stage coach was waiting before the station. The Pine Barrens mail wagon that connected with it was long overdue, with its transfer passengers, and the station had relapsed into listless expectation. Even the humors of Dick Boyle, the Chicago “drummer,”—and, so far, the solitary passenger—which had diverted the waiting loungers, began to fail in effect, though the cheerfulness of the humorist was unabated. The ostlers had slunk back into the stables, the station keeper and stage driver had reduced their conversation to impatient monosyllables, as if each thought the other responsible for the delay. A solitary Indian, wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the stunted, far-spaced pines in the distance, known as the “Barrens;” on the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage brush, like the scars of burnt-out fires.

Dick Boyle approached the motionless Indian as a possible relief. “YOU don’t seem to care much if school keeps or not, do you, Lo?”

The Indian, who had been half crouching on his upturned soles, here straightened himself with a lithe, animal-like movement, and stood up. Boyle took hold of a corner of his blanket and examined it critically.

“Gov’ment ain’t pampering you with A1 goods, Lo! I reckon the agent charged ‘em four dollars for that. Our firm could have delivered them to you for 2 dols. 37 cents, and thrown in a box of beads in the bargain. Suthin like this!” He took from his pocket a small box containing a gaudy bead necklace and held it up before the Indian.

The savage, who had regarded him—or rather looked beyond him—with the tolerating indifference of one interrupted by a frisking inferior animal, here suddenly changed his expression. A look of childish eagerness came into his gloomy face; he reached out his hand for the trinket.

“Hol’ on!” said Boyle, hesitating for a moment; then he suddenly ejaculated, “Well! take it, and one o’ these,” and drew a business card from his pocket, which he stuck in the band of the battered tall hat of the aborigine. “There! show that to your friends, and when you’re wantin’ anything in our line”—

The interrupting roar of laughter, coming from the box seat of the coach, was probably what Boyle was expecting, for he turned away demurely and walked towards the coach. “All right, boys! I’ve squared the noble red man, and the star of empire is taking its westward way. And I reckon our firm will do the ‘Great Father’ business for him at about half the price that it is done in Washington.”

But at this point the ostlers came hurrying out of the stables. “She’s comin’,” said one. “That’s her dust just behind the Lone Pine—and by the way she’s racin’ I reckon she’s comin’ in mighty light.”

“That’s so,” said the mail agent, standing up on the box seat for a better view, “but darned ef I kin see any outside passengers. I reckon we haven’t waited for much.”

Indeed, as the galloping horses of the incoming vehicle pulled out of the hanging dust in the distance, the solitary driver could be seen urging on his team. In a few moments more they had halted at the lower end of the station.

“Wonder what’s up!” said the mail agent.

“Nothin’! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens,” said one of the ostlers. “Injins doin’ ghost dancin’—or suthin like that—and the passengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar’s only one ez dar come—and she’s a lady.”

“A lady?” echoed Boyle.

“Yes,” answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall, graceful girl who, waiving the gallant assistance of the station keeper, had leaped unaided from the vehicle. “A lady—and the fort commandant’s darter at that! She’s clar grit, you bet—a chip o’ the old block. And all this means, sonny, that you’re to give up that box seat to HER. Miss Julia Cantire don’t take anythin’ less when I’m around.”

The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards the waiting coach—erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over—he was rather short; through him—he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested with a frank recognition on the driver.

“Good-morning, Mr. Foster,” she said, with a smile.

“Mornin’, miss. I hear they’re havin’ an Injin scare over at the Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein’ stumped by a lady!”

“I don’t think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them,” returned the young lady indifferently; “besides, they are Eastern people, who don’t know Indians as well as WE do, Mr. Foster.”

The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. “Yes, ma’am,” he laughed, “I reckon the sight of even old ‘Fleas in the Blanket’ over there,” pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, “would frighten ‘em out o’ their boots. And yet he’s got inside his hat the business card o’ this gentleman—Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling for the big firm o’ Fletcher & Co. of Chicago”—he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; “so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN’ was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!”

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags and a quantity of luggage—evidently belonging to the evading passengers—were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his conviction that his vehicle was used as a “d–d baggage truck,” but he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track, but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes hitherto invisible through the irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and disappeared. The dust cloud which indicated the coach—probably owing to these same irregularities—had long since been lost on the visible horizon.

The fringe which received him was really the rim of a depression quite concealed from the surface of the plain,—which it followed for some miles through a tangled trough-like bottom of low trees and underbrush,—and was a natural cover for wolves, coyotes, and occasionally bears, whose half-human footprint might have deceived a stranger. This did not, however, divert the Indian, who, trotting still doggedly on, paused only to examine another footprint—much more frequent—the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins. The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness—an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as a single file of Indians, following each other in the same tireless trot. The woods and underbrush were full of them; all moving on, as he had moved, in a line parallel with the vanishing coach. Sometimes through the openings a bared painted limb, a crest of feathers, or a strip of gaudy blanket was visible, but nothing more. And yet only a few hundred yards away stretched the dusky, silent plain—vacant of sound or motion!

Meanwhile the Sage Wood and Pine Barren stage coach, profoundly oblivious—after the manner of all human invention—of everything but its regular function, toiled dustily out of the higher plain and began the grateful descent of a wooded canyon, which was, in fact, the culminating point of the depression, just described, along which the shadowy procession was slowly advancing, hardly a mile in the rear and flank of the vehicle. Miss Julia Cantire, who had faced the dust volleys of the plain unflinchingly, as became a soldier’s daughter, here stood upright and shook herself—her pretty head and figure emerging like a goddess from the enveloping silver cloud. At least Mr. Boyle, relegated to the back seat, thought so—although her conversation and attentions had been chiefly directed to the driver and mail agent. Once, when he had light-heartedly addressed a remark to her, it had been received with a distinct but unpromising politeness that had made him desist from further attempts, yet without abatement of his cheerfulness, or resentment of the evident amusement his two male companions got out of his “snub.” Indeed, it is to be feared that Miss Julia had certain prejudices of position, and may have thought that a “drummer”—or commercial traveler—was no more fitting company for the daughter of a major than an ordinary peddler. But it was more probable that Mr. Boyle’s reputation as a humorist—a teller of funny stories and a boon companion of men—was inconsistent with the feminine ideal of high and exalted manhood. The man who “sets the table in a roar” is apt to be secretly detested by the sex, to say nothing of the other obvious reasons why Juliets do not like Mercutios!

For some such cause as this Dick Boyle was obliged to amuse himself silently, alone on the back seat, with those liberal powers of observation which nature had given him. On entering the canyon he had noticed the devious route the coach had taken to reach it, and had already invented an improved route which should enter the depression at the point where the Indians had already (unknown to him) plunged into it, and had conceived a road through the tangled brush that would shorten the distance by some miles. He had figured it out, and believed that it “would pay.” But by this time they were beginning the somewhat steep and difficult ascent of the canyon on the other side. The vehicle had not crawled many yards before it stopped. Dick Boyle glanced around. Miss Cantire was getting down. She had expressed a wish to walk the rest of the ascent, and the coach was to wait for her at the top. Foster had effusively begged her to take her own time—“there was no hurry!” Boyle glanced a little longingly after her graceful figure, released from her cramped position on the box, as it flitted youthfully in and out of the wayside trees; he would like to have joined her in the woodland ramble, but even his good nature was not proof against her indifference. At a turn in the road they lost sight of her, and, as the driver and mail agent were deep in a discussion about the indistinct track, Boyle lapsed into his silent study of the country. Suddenly he uttered a slight exclamation, and quietly slipped from the back of the toiling coach to the ground. The action was, however, quickly noted by the driver, who promptly put his foot on the brake and pulled up. “Wot’s up now?” he growled.

Boyle did not reply, but ran back a few steps and began searching eagerly on the ground.

“Lost suthin?” asked Foster.

“Found something,” said Boyle, picking up a small object. “Look at that! D–d if it isn’t the card I gave that Indian four hours ago at the station!” He held up the card.

“Look yer, sonny,” retorted Foster gravely, “ef yer wantin’ to get out and hang round Miss Cantire, why don’t yer say so at oncet? That story won’t wash!”

“Fact!” continued Boyle eagerly. “It’s the same card I stuck in his hat—there’s the greasy mark in the corner. How the devil did it—how did HE get here?”

“Better ax him,” said Foster grimly, “ef he’s anywhere round.”

“But I say, Foster, I don’t like the look of this at all! Miss Cantire is alone, and”—

But a burst of laughter from Foster and the mail agent interrupted him. “That’s so,” said Foster. “That’s your best holt! Keep it up! You jest tell her that! Say thar’s another Injin skeer on; that that thar bloodthirsty ole ‘Fleas in His Blanket’ is on the warpath, and you’re goin’ to shed the last drop o’ your blood defendin’ her! That’ll fetch her, and she ain’t bin treatin’ you well! G’lang!”

The horses started forward under Foster’s whip, leaving Boyle standing there, half inclined to join in the laugh against himself, and yet impelled by some strange instinct to take a more serious view of his discovery. There was no doubt it was the same card he had given to the Indian. True, that Indian might have given it to another—yet by what agency had it been brought there faster than the coach traveled on the same road, and yet invisibly to them? For an instant the humorous idea of literally accepting Foster’s challenge, and communicating his discovery to Miss Cantire, occurred to him; he could have made a funny story out of it, and could have amused any other girl with it, but he would not force himself upon her, and again doubted if the discovery were a matter of amusement. If it were really serious, why should he alarm her? He resolved, however, to remain on the road, and within convenient distance of her, until she returned to the coach; she could not be far away. With this purpose he walked slowly on, halting occasionally to look behind.

Meantime the coach continued its difficult ascent, a difficulty made greater by the singular nervousness of the horses, that only with great trouble and some objurgation from the driver could be prevented from shying from the regular track.

“Now, wot’s gone o’ them critters?” said the irate Foster, straining at the reins until he seemed to lift the leader back into the track again.

“Looks as ef they smelt suthin—b’ar or Injin ponies,” suggested the mail agent.

“Injin ponies?” repeated Foster scornfully.

“Fac’! Injin ponies set a hoss crazy—jest as wild hosses would!”

“Whar’s yer Injin ponies?” demanded Foster incredulously.

“Dunno,” said the mail agent simply.

But here the horses again swerved so madly from some point of the thicket beside them that the coach completely left the track on the right. Luckily it was a disused trail and the ground fairly good, and Foster gave them their heads, satisfied of his ability to regain the regular road when necessary. It took some moments for him to recover complete control of the frightened animals, and then their nervousness having abated with their distance from the thicket, and the trail being less steep though more winding than the regular road, he concluded to keep it until he got to the summit, when he would regain the highway once more and await his passengers. Having done this, the two men stood up on the box, and with an anxiety they tried to conceal from each other looked down the canyon for the lagging pedestrians.

“I hope Miss Cantire hasn’t been stampeded from the track by any skeer like that,” said the mail agent dubiously.

“Not she! She’s got too much grit and sabe for that, unless that drummer hez caught up with her and unloaded his yarn about that kyard.”

They were the last words the men spoke. For two rifle shots cracked from the thicket beside the road; two shots aimed with such deliberateness and precision that the two men, mortally stricken, collapsed where they stood, hanging for a brief moment over the dashboard before they rolled over on the horses’ backs. Nor did they remain there long, for the next moment they were seized by half a dozen shadowy figures and with the horses and their cut traces dragged into the thicket. A half dozen and then a dozen other shadows flitted and swarmed over, in, and through the coach, reinforced by still more, until the whole vehicle seemed to be possessed, covered, and hidden by them, swaying and moving with their weight, like helpless carrion beneath a pack of ravenous wolves. Yet even while this seething congregation was at its greatest, at some unknown signal it as suddenly dispersed, vanished, and disappeared, leaving the coach empty—vacant and void of all that had given it life, weight, animation, and purpose—a mere skeleton on the roadside. The afternoon wind blew through its open doors and ravaged rack and box as if it had been the wreck of weeks instead of minutes, and the level rays of the setting sun flashed and blazed into its windows as though fire had been added to the ruin. But even this presently faded, leaving the abandoned coach a rigid, lifeless spectre on the twilight plain.

An hour later there was the sound of hurrying hoofs and jingling accoutrements, and out of the plain swept a squad of cavalrymen bearing down upon the deserted vehicle. For a few moments they, too, seemed to surround and possess it, even as the other shadows had done, penetrating the woods and thicket beside it. And then as suddenly at some signal they swept forward furiously in the track of the destroying shadows.

Miss Cantire took full advantage of the suggestion “not to hurry” in her walk, with certain feminine ideas of its latitude. She gathered a few wild flowers and some berries in the underwood, inspected some birds’ nests with a healthy youthful curiosity, and even took the opportunity of arranging some moist tendrils of her silky hair with something she took from the small reticule that hung coquettishly from her girdle. It was, indeed, some twenty minutes before she emerged into the road again; the vehicle had evidently disappeared in a turn of the long, winding ascent, but just ahead of her was that dreadful man, the “Chicago drummer.” She was not vain, but she made no doubt that he was waiting there for her. There was no avoiding him, but his companionship could be made a brief one. She began to walk with ostentatious swiftness.

Boyle, whose concern for her safety was secretly relieved at this, began to walk forward briskly too without looking around. Miss Cantire was not prepared for this; it looked so ridiculously as if she were chasing him! She hesitated slightly, but now as she was nearly abreast of him she was obliged to keep on.

“I think you do well to hurry, Miss Cantire,” he said as she passed. “I’ve lost sight of the coach for some time, and I dare say they’re already waiting for us at the summit.”

Miss Cantire did not like this any better. To go on beside this dreadful man, scrambling breathlessly after the stage—for all the world like an absorbed and sentimentally belated pair of picnickers—was really TOO much. “Perhaps if YOU ran on and told them I was coming as fast as I could,” she suggested tentatively.

“It would be as much as my life is worth to appear before Foster without you,” he said laughingly. “You’ve only got to hurry on a little faster.”

But the young lady resented this being driven by a “drummer.” She began to lag, depressing her pretty brows ominously.

“Let me carry your flowers,” said Boyle. He had noticed that she was finding some difficulty in holding up her skirt and the nosegay at the same time.

“No! No!” she said in hurried horror at this new suggestion of their companionship. “Thank you very much—but they’re really not worth keeping—I am going to throw them away. There!” she added, tossing them impatiently in the dust.

But she had not reckoned on Boyle’s perfect good-humor. That gentle idiot stooped down, actually gathered them up again, and was following! She hurried on; if she could only get to the coach first, ignoring him! But a vulgar man like that would be sure to hand them to her with some joke! Then she lagged again—she was getting tired, and she could see no sign of the coach. The drummer, too, was also lagging behind—at a respectful distance, like a groom or one of her father’s troopers. Nevertheless this did not put her in a much better humor, and halting until he came abreast of her, she said impatiently: “I don’t see why Mr. Foster should think it necessary to send any one to look after me.”

“He didn’t,” returned Boyle simply. “I got down to pick up something.”

“To pick up something?” she returned incredulously.

“Yes. THAT.” He held out the card. “It’s the card of our firm.”

Miss Cantire smiled ironically. “You are certainly devoted to your business.”

“Well, yes,” returned Boyle good-humoredly. “You see I reckon it don’t pay to do anything halfway. And whatever I do, I mean to keep my eyes about me.” In spite of her prejudice, Miss Cantire could see that these necessary organs, if rather flippant, were honest. “Yes, I suppose there isn’t much on that I don’t take in. Why now, Miss Cantire, there’s that fancy dust cloak you’re wearing—it isn’t in our line of goods—nor in anybody’s line west of Chicago; it came from Boston or New York, and was made for home consumption! But your hat—and mighty pretty it is too, as YOU’VE fixed it up—is only regular Dunstable stock, which we could put down at Pine Barrens for four and a half cents a piece, net. Yet I suppose you paid nearly twenty-five cents for it at the Agency!”

Oddly enough this cool appraisement of her costume did not incense the young lady as it ought to have done. On the contrary, for some occult feminine reason, it amused and interested her. It would be such a good story to tell her friends of a “drummer’s" idea of gallantry; and to tease the flirtatious young West Pointer who had just joined. And the appraisement was truthful—Major Cantire had only his pay—and Miss Cantire had been obliged to select that hat from the government stores.

“Are you in the habit of giving this information to ladies you meet in traveling?” she asked.

“Well, no!” answered Boyle—“for that’s just where you have to keep your eyes open. Most of ‘em wouldn’t like it, and it’s no use aggravating a possible customer. But you are not that kind.”

Miss Cantire was silent. She knew she was not of that kind, but she did not require his vulgar indorsement. She pushed on for some moments alone, when suddenly he hailed her. She turned impatiently. He was carefully examining the road on both sides.

“We have either lost our way,” he said, rejoining her, “or the coach has turned off somewhere. These tracks are not fresh, and as they are all going the same way, they were made by the up coach last night. They’re not OUR tracks; I thought it strange we hadn’t sighted the coach by this time.”

“And then”—said Miss Cantire impatiently.

“We must turn back until we find them again.”

The young lady frowned. “Why not keep on until we get to the top?” she said pettishly. “I’m sure I shall.” She stopped suddenly as she caught sight of his grave face and keen, observant eyes. “Why can’t we go on as we are?”

“Because we are expected to come back to the COACH—and not to the summit merely. These are the ‘orders,’ and you know you are a soldier’s daughter!” He laughed as he spoke, but there was a certain quiet deliberation in his manner that impressed her. When he added, after a pause, “We must go back and find where the tracks turned off,” she obeyed without a word.

They walked for some time, eagerly searching for signs of the missing vehicle. A curious interest and a new reliance in Boyle’s judgment obliterated her previous annoyance, and made her more natural. She ran ahead of him with youthful eagerness, examining the ground, following a false clue with great animation, and confessing her defeat with a charming laugh. And it was she who, after retracing their steps for ten minutes, found the diverging track with a girlish cry of triumph. Boyle, who had followed her movements quite as interestedly as her discovery, looked a little grave as he noticed the deep indentations made by the struggling horses. Miss Cantire detected the change in his face; ten minutes before she would never have observed it. “I suppose we had better follow the new track,” she said inquiringly, as he seemed to hesitate.

“Certainly,” he said quickly, as if coming to a prompt decision. “That is safest.”

“What do you think has happened? The ground looks very much cut up,” she said in a confidential tone, as new to her as her previous observation of him.

“A horse has probably stumbled and they’ve taken the old trail as less difficult,” said Boyle promptly. In his heart he did not believe it, yet he knew that if anything serious had threatened them the coach would have waited in the road. “It’s an easier trail for us, though I suppose it’s a little longer,” he added presently.

“You take everything so good-humoredly, Mr. Boyle,” she said after a pause.

“It’s the way to do business, Miss Cantire,” he said. “A man in my line has to cultivate it.”

She wished he hadn’t said that, but, nevertheless, she returned a little archly: “But you haven’t any business with the stage company nor with ME, although I admit I intend to get my Dunstable hereafter from your firm at the wholesale prices.”