e clans. Once again she came near going off the mule, and Hale
observed that she was holding to the cantel of his saddle.

"Look here," he said suddenly, "hadn't you better catch hold of me?" She
shook her head vigorously and made two not-to-be-rendered sounds that
meant:

"No, indeed."

"Well, if this were your sweetheart you'd take hold of him, wouldn't
you?"

Again she gave a vigorous shake of the head.

"Well, if he saw you riding behind me, he wouldn't like it, would he?"

"She didn't keer," she said, but Hale did; and when he heard the
galloping of horses behind him, saw two men coming, and heard one
of them shouting--"Hyeh, you man on that yaller mule, stop thar"--he
shifted his revolver, pulled in and waited with some uneasiness. They
came up, reeling in their saddles--neither one the girl's sweetheart,
as he saw at once from her face--and began to ask what the girl
characterized afterward as "unnecessary questions": who he was, who she
was, and where they were going. Hale answered so shortly that the girl
thought there was going to be a fight, and she was on the point of
slipping from the mule.

"Sit still," said Hale, quietly. "There's not going to be a fight so
long as you are here."

"Thar hain't!" said one of the men. "Well"--then he looked sharply
at the girl and turned his horse--"Come on, Bill--that's ole Dave
Tolliver's gal." The girl's face was on fire.

"Them mean Falins!" she said contemptuously, and somehow the mere fact
that Hale had been even for the moment antagonistic to the other
faction seemed to put him in the girl's mind at once on her side, and
straightway she talked freely of the feud. Devil Judd had taken
no active part in it for a long time, she said, except to keep it
down--especially since he and her father had had a "fallin' out" and
the two families did not visit much--though she and her cousin June
sometimes spent the night with each other.

"You won't be able to git over thar till long atter dark," she said, and
she caught her breath so suddenly and so sharply that Hale turned to see
what the matter was. She searched his face with her black eyes, which
were like June's without the depths of June's.

"I was just a-wonderin' if mebbe you wasn't the same feller that was
over in Lonesome last fall."

"Maybe I am--my name's Hale." The girl laughed. "Well, if this ain't the
beatenest! I've heerd June talk about you. My brother Dave don't like
you overmuch," she added fran