eyes now. His
beard was gone and he was much changed. She trembled when she shook
hands with him and she did not call him by his name Old Judd came in,
and a moment later the two men and Bub sat on the porch while the women
worked, and when June rose again to go indoors, she felt the newcomer's
bold eyes take her slowly in from head to foot and she turned crimson.
This was the terror among the Tollivers--Bad Rufe, come back from the
West to take part in the feud. HE saw the belt and the stockings and
the shoes, the white column of her throat and the proud set of her
gold-crowned head; HE knew what they meant, he made her feel that
he knew, and later he managed to catch her eyes once with an amused,
half-contemptuous glance at the simple untravelled folk about them, that
said plainly how well he knew they two were set apart from them, and she
shrank fearfully from the comradeship that the glance implied and
would look at him no more. He knew everything that was going on in the
mountains. He had come back "ready for business," he said. When he made
ready to go, June went to her room and stayed there, but she heard him
say to her father that he was going over to the Gap, and with a laugh
that chilled her soul:

"I'm goin' over to kill me a policeman." And her father warned gruffly:

"You better keep away from thar. You don't understand them fellers." And
she heard Rufe's brutal laugh again, and as he rode into the creek his
horse stumbled and she saw him cut cruelly at the poor beast's ears with
the rawhide quirt that he carried. She was glad when all went home, and
the only ray of sunlight in the day for her radiated from Uncle Billy's
face when, at sunset, he came to take old Hon home. The old miller was
the one unchanged soul to her in that he was the one soul that could see
no change in June. He called her "baby" in the old way, and he talked to
her now as he had talked to her as a child. He took her aside to ask her
if she knew that Hale had got his license to marry, and when she shook
her head, his round, red face lighted up with the benediction of a
rising sun:

"Well, that's what he's done, baby, an' he's axed me to marry ye," he
added, with boyish pride, "he's axed ME."

And June choked, her eyes filled, and she was dumb, but Uncle Billy
could not see that it meant distress and not joy. He just put his arm
around her and whispered:

"I ain't told a soul, baby--not a soul."

She went to bed and to sleep wit