n't 'a'
thought so. It's the fight scared you plumb to pieces. Carthy told me
about it and how you let the good-looking kid out by the back. I seen him
ride off toward Hidden Creek this morning. He was a real pretty boy too.
Say, Sheila, wasn't you ever kissed?"

"No," said Sheila. "And I don't want to be." Sylvester laughed with a
little low cackle of intense pleasure and amusement. "Well, you shan't
be. No, you shan't. Nobody shall kiss Sheila!"

His method seemed to him successful. Sheila stopped crying and stopped
laughing, dried her eyes, murmured, "I'm all right now, thank you, Mr.
Hudson," and fell into an abysmal silence.

He talked smoothly, soothingly, skillfully, confident of his power to
manage "gels." Once in a while he saw her teeth gleam as though she
smiled. As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western
twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face.

She thanked him, gave him her hand. "Don't come up, please, Mr. Hudson,"
she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly
capable. "I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I
go to work."

"You feel O.K.?" he asked her doubtfully. His brown eyes had an almost
doglike wistfulness.

"Quite, thank you." Her easy, effortless smile passed across her face and
in and out of her eyes.

Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her.
The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking,
stopped their breathing to see Sheila pass. When she had gone, they
fastened their attention upon Sylvester. He was not aware of them. He
stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity. Then he
sighed and climbed into his car.

CHAPTER XII

HUDSON'S QUEEN

The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila passed through it on her way up
to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice. In front of the
desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill
with Dickie. At the sound of Sheila's entrance he turned, stopped his
complaint, watched her pass, and spat into a near-by receptacle. Sheila
remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and
had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry.
Dickie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the
bill. In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a
plump dirty forefinger pounced up