-times as well as in the school-room. Two or three of the girls
had made friendly advances to her, but she had shyly repelled them--why
she hardly knew--and it was her lonely custom at recess-times to build
a play-house at the foot of a great beech with moss, broken bits of
bottles and stones. Once she found it torn to pieces and from the look
on the face of the tall mountain boy, Cal Heaton, who had grinned at her
when she went up for her first lesson, and who was now Bob's arch-enemy,
she knew that he was the guilty one. Again a day or two later it was
destroyed, and when she came down from the woods almost in tears, Bob
happened to meet her in the road and made her tell the trouble she was
in. Straightway he charged the trespasser with the deed and was lied to
for his pains. So after school that day he slipped up on the hill with
the little girl and helped her rebuild again.

"Now I'll lay for him," said Bob, "and catch him at it."

"All right," said June, and she looked both her worry and her gratitude
so that Bob understood both; and he answered both with a nonchalant wave
of one hand.

"Never you mind--and don't you tell Mr. Hale," and June in dumb
acquiescence crossed heart and body. But the mountain boy was wary, and
for two or three days the play-house was undisturbed and so Bob himself
laid a trap. He mounted his horse immediately after school, rode past
the mountain lad, who was on his way home, crossed the river, made a
wide detour at a gallop and, hitching his horse in the woods, came to
the play-house from the other side of the hill. And half an hour later,
when the pale little teacher came out of the school-house, he heard
grunts and blows and scuffling up in the woods, and when he ran toward
the sounds, the bodies of two of his pupils rolled into sight clenched
fiercely, with torn clothes and bleeding faces--Bob on top with the
mountain boy's thumb in his mouth and his own fingers gripped about his
antagonist's throat. Neither paid any attention to the school-master,
who pulled at Bob's coat unavailingly and with horror at his ferocity.
Bob turned his head, shook it as well as the thumb in his mouth would
let him, and went on gripping the throat under him and pushing the head
that belonged to it into the ground. The mountain boy's tongue showed
and his eyes bulged.

"'Nough!" he yelled. Bob rose then and told his story and the
school-master from New England gave them a short lecture on gentleness
and