"Well, you see the Cross-Roads efforts have proved so purely hygienic for
me. As a patriot I have sometimes felt extreme mortification that such bad
marksmanship should exist in the county, but I console myself with the
thought that their best shots are unhappily in the penitentiary."

"There are many left. Can't you understand that they will organize again
and come in a body, as they did before you broke them up? And then, if
they come on a night when they know you are wandering out of town----"

"You have not the advantage of an intimate study of the most exclusive
people of the Cross-Roads, Miss Sherwood. There are about twenty gentlemen
who remain in that neighborhood while their relatives sojourn under
discipline. If you had the entree over there, you would understand that
these twenty could not gather themselves into a company and march the
seven miles without physical debate in the ranks. They are not precisely
amiable people, even amongst themselves. They would quarrel and shoot
each other to pieces long before they got here."

"But they worked in a company once."

"Never for seven miles. Four miles was their radius. Five would see them
all dead."

She struck the bench again. "Oh, you laugh at me! You make a joke of your
own life and death, and laugh at everything! Have five years of Plattville
taught you to do that?"

"I laugh only at taking the poor Cross-Roaders too seriously. I don't
laugh at your running into fire to help a fellow-mortal."