defiantly. "Will you go?" he roared.

"No!"

He dropped her wrists, caught her up in his arms as if she had been a
kitten, and leaped into the shadow of the trees that leaned over the road
from the yard. The rifle rang out again, and the little ball whistled
venomously overhead. Harkless ran along the fence and turned in at the
gate.

A loose strand of the girl's hair blew across his cheek, and in the moon
her head shone with gold. She had light-brown hair and gray eyes and a
short upper lip like a curled rose-leaf. He set her down on the veranda
steps. Both of them laughed wildly.

"But you came with me!" she gasped triumphantly.

"I always thought you were tall," he answered; and there was afterward a
time when he had to agree that this was a somewhat vague reply.




CHAPTER VI


JUNE

Judge Briscoe smiled grimly and leaned on his shot-gun in the moonlight by
the veranda. He and William Todd had been trampling down the elder-bushes,