Cajolery and threats were alike futile. Saxe Gotha was guarding for his man. After a while the dog's dumb fury maddened the stranger. He began to hurl rocks at the pup. At first the shots were harmless; then a jagged piece of ore caught the dog on the cheek and laid it open, and another slashed his back. With the snarl of a tiger, Saxe Gotha made a leap from the door at the stranger's throat. The man screamed, and jumped for his horse so hastily that Saxe Gotha caught only the shoulder of his coat and ripped the back out of the garment. Before the pup could gather his weakened body for another charge, the stranger was mounted. He whipped his snorting horse down the trail, and disappeared.

Saxe Gotha feebly worried at the torn coat, then dragged himself back to the door and lay down on the vest, too weak to lick his wounds. The rest of the morning he lay quiet. At noon he suddenly opened his eyes.

His ears pricked forward, and his tail beat feebly on the floor. His man rode up. He had a sack of fresh supplies thrown across his saddle.

He turned his horse into the corral, then came toward the hut. The vicious mood seemed still to be with him.

"You still here?" he growled.

Then he caught sight of the piece of cloth, picked it up, and looked at the mauled and blood-stained muck on it. He stared at Saxe Gotha curiously.

"Johnson was here, eh? I'd know that check anywhere. The thief! What happened?"

As Evans came up, Saxe Gotha tried to give the old gambol of joy, but succeeded only in falling heavily. The young fellow strode into the hut, and walked slowly about. The sack of nuggets was still behind the door. The map that he had long ago prepared for the company for which he was investigating mines still lay covered with dust. On the table were the hunk of bacon, the fried potatoes, the dry bread. A number of jagged rocks were scattered on the floor. The dog was bloody.

Slowly young Evans turned his whole attention to Saxe Gotha, who lay watching him with passionate intentness. Evans took a handful of raw potato skins from the table and offered them to the pup. Saxe Gotha snatched at them and swallowed them as if frenzied with hunger. Evans looked at the food on the table, then at the famished, emaciated dog.

He stood gripping the edge of the table and staring out at the desert.

A slow red came up from his neck and crossed his face; it seemed a magic red, for it wiped the vicious lines from his face and left it boyish and shamed. Suddenly his lips trembled. He dropped down in the doorway and ran his hand gently along the pup's sensitive back. His bloodshot eyes were blinded with tears.

"Old man," he whispered to Saxe Gotha, "I wasn't worth it!"

The dog looked up into the young man's face with an expression eager and questioning. And then, summoning all his feeble strength, he crowded his long, awkward body into the young man's lap....

After a moment he set Saxe Gotha on the floor and fed him a can of evaporated milk, carefully warmed, with bits of freshly fried bacon in it. He washed out the dog's cuts, then put him to bed in his own bunk.

All that afternoon, while the dog slept, Evans paced the hut, fighting his fight. And, like all solitary desert-dwellers, he talked aloud....

"They promised to pay me regularly, to raise me, to give me a job in the home office after a year. It's been two years now. Yes, I know, I made some promises. I was to report all finds and turn in all valuable ore to them. But they haven't treated me right."

Then he turned to the sleeping dog, and his face softened.

"Wouldn't that beat you, his not eating the stuff on the table!

Goodness knows I'd treated him badly enough! It seems as if even a dog might have a sense of honor; as if it didn't matter what I was, the fool pup had to keep straight with himself; as if--"

Suddenly Evans stopped and gulped. Again came the slow, agonizing blush. For a long time he stood in silence. Finally, he squared his shoulders and moistened his lips.

"I can send the maps and what ore I have left by stage tomorrow. But it will take another year to get the whole thing straightened up, and get them paid back--another year of loneliness, and sand-storms, and sweltering. No snowy Christmas or green spring or the smell of burning leaves in the fall this year for me. I guess the pup will stay by me, though."

As if he realized that there was need of him, Saxe Gotha woke, and ambled over to the man's side. Evans sat down in the door, and the dog squatted beside him. Evans turned, took the dog's great head between his hands, and looked into the limpid eyes.

"I guess, old man, that there are more ways than one of making a success of yourself, and money-making is the least of them."

In Evans's eyes were the loneliness and grief of disappointed youth.

But the rest of his face once more was clear and boyish with the wonderful courage of the young.

Saxe Gotha pawed Evans's knee wistfully. Perhaps across the stillness of the desert he caught the baying of the hunting pack in some distant, rain-drenched woodland. Yet he would not go. The dog leaned warmly against his man, who slid an arm across the tawny back. Then, with faces to their forbidden north, man and dog watched the desert night advance.

EDNA FERBER.

Among those who are striving for a permanent place among short story writers is Edna Ferber, a young woman who makes her stories interesting through her own keen observation of character traits revealed in the everyday life about her.

Miss Ferber's work deserves mention among any group of Wisconsin writers quite as much from the promise of what may still come as from that already accomplished. Her ability to see the real in character and the truth in real life is the strong characteristic of her work. She has attempted to follow somewhat closely the language of the everyday life she portrays.

Edna Ferber's short stories, many of which have appeared in various magazines, have been collected into books published under the titles of "Buttered Side Down," "Dawn O'Hara,"

"Roast Beef Medium," and "Personality Plus." These stories are unified through the two characters portrayed, Dawn O'Hara and Mrs. Emma McChesney. It is probable that much of her own struggle and much of her aspiration for women is portrayed in these two characters. She hopes to show that women may make an undisputed place for themselves in the professional and business life.

The first of these characters is a young Irish woman who has devoted her energies to the mastering of the city newspaper reporter's work. Through the story of Dawn O'Hara's struggles, Edna Ferber has been able to give many interesting comments upon the toil and thrills of this nerve-racking work. At the same time she has been able to paint the struggle of the young writer to produce the first book, to picture German Milwaukee in a most interesting manner, and to make some interesting comments upon mutual helpfulness.

Emma McChesney is an example of the extraordinarily successful business woman. Despite the most discouraging conditions, she works her way from the beginning of a firm's least inviting employment to the complete management of its affairs. All the time she is inspired by the desire to give her son the best education and the best start in life and to assist him to the most manly character possible. The author rewards Emma McChesney with the full realization of her ambitions.

Edna Ferber was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her home was a humble one, but was able to provide her with the opportunity for high school education and a very little work in Lawrence College. After graduating from high school, she did work for the Appleton Crescent in the capacity of news collector and reporter. Through this work she began to realize her powers and at the same time she trained herself to that keen observation of character which constitutes one of the greatest pleasures in her work. Appleton's stores, hotels, newspapers, and working life in general became her laboratory in which to study the characteristics, defects, and aspirations of human life as she finds it. As she has achieved greater success in her writing she has widened her sphere of acquaintanceship and of helpfulness. Her present home is Chicago.

The selection from her writings which we are permitted to give here is chosen because it illustrates her style and at the same time gives a vivid picture of one phase of the life of Wisconsin's metropolis. It is a chapter taken from her book, "Dawn O'Hara," and is entitled, "Steeped in German."

STEEPED IN GERMAN

From "DAWN O'HARA." Copyright, 1911, by Frederick Stokes Publishing Co.

I am living in a little private hotel just across from the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and Herr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down to breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creature in the place that isn't just over from Germany. Even the dog is a dachshund. It is so unbelievable that every day or two I go down to Wisconsin Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from the government building, in order to convince myself that this is America.

It needs only a Kaiser or so, and a bit of Unter den Linden to be quite complete.

The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau Knapf. After one has seen them, one quite understands why the place is steeped in a German atmosphere up to the eyebrows.

I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor von Gerhard who had suggested Knapf's and who had paved the way for my coming here.

"You will find it quite unlike anything you have ever tried before,"

he had warned me. "Very German it is, and very, very clean, and most inexpensive. Also I think you will find material there--how is it you call it?--copy, yes? Well, there should be copy in plenty; and types!

But you shall see."

From the moment I rang the Knapf door-bell I saw. The dapper, cheerful Herr Knapf, wearing a disappointed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened the door. I scarcely had begun to make my wishes known when he interrupted with a large wave of the hand, and an elaborate German bow.

"Ach, yes! You would be the lady of whom the Herr Doktor has spoken.

Gewiss Frau Orme, not? But so a young lady I did not expect to see. A room we have saved for you--aber wunderhubsch. It makes me much pleasure to show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."

"You--speak English?" I faltered with visions of my evenings spent in expressing myself in the sign language.

"English? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber mostly German. And then, too, I have been only twenty years in this country. And always in Milwaukee. Here is it gemutlich--and mostly it gives German."

I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up to the--"but wonderfully beautiful" room. To my joy I found it high-ceilinged, airy, and huge, with a vault of a clothes closet bristling with hooks, and boasting an unbelievable number of shelves. My trunk was swallowed up in it. Never in all my boarding-house experience have I seen such a room nor such a closet. The closet must have been built for a bride's trousseau in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There was a separate and distinct hook for each and every one of my most obscure garments. I tried to spread them out. I used two hooks to every petticoat, and three for my kimono, and when I had finished there were rows of hooks to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for the hat-boxes which I possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunion in that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in a social bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have loved to show that closet to a select circle of New York boarding-house landladies!

After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I turned my attention to my room. I yanked a towel thing off the center table and replaced it with a scarf that Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up my typewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay cushion or two and a chafing-dish out of my trunk. I distributed photographs of Norah and Max and the Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups.

Then I bounced up and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and found it unbelievably comfortable. Of course, I reflected, after the big veranda, and the tree at Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of her library, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and hangings--

"Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You can't expect charming tones and Oriental doo-dads and apple trees in a German boarding house. Anyhow there's running water in the room. For general utility purposes that's better than a pink prayer rug."