Jason turned on her in a fury.

"I seed you a-lookin' at him!"

"'Tain't so! I seed you a-lookin' at HER!" she retorted, but her
eyes fell before his accusing gaze, and she began worming a bare
toe into the sand.

"Air ye goin' home now?" she asked, presently.

"No," he said shortly, "I'm a-goin' atter him. You go on home."

The boy started up the hill, and in a moment the girl was trotting
after him. He turned when he heard the patter of her feet.

"Huh!" he grunted contemptuously, and kept on. At the top of the
hill he saw several men on horseback in the bend of the road
below, and he turned into the bushes.

"They mought tell on us," explained Jason, and hiding bow and
arrow and fishing-pole, they slipped along the flank of the spur
until they stood on a point that commanded the broad river-bottom
at the mouth of the creek.

By the roadside down there, was the ancestral home of the Hawns
with an orchard about it, a big garden, a stable huge for that
part of the world, and a meat-house where for three-quarters of a
century there had always been things "hung up." The old log house
in which Jason and Mavis's great-great-grandfather had spent his