"Oh, you smooth-bore! But I have to go, anyhow. I'm headin' off what's
trailin' you. Don't look back. It's Stellar Bahrr, comin' out to see
who's been to see their folks to-day and who's neglectin' 'em,
'specially late arrivals. She's seen my game, though, now, an' she's
shabbin' off to the side gate, knowin' I'd head her back to town. Say,
York, she's after Miss Swaim now. You watch out. Them that's the
worthlessest and has the least influence in a community can start the
biggest fires burnin'. Everybody in New Eden's been buffaloed by
her--just scared blue--except maybe us two. You ain't, I know, and I'm
right sure I ain't."

"Ponk, you are as good as you are good-looking," York said, heartily.
"The Big Dipper could start a tale of our guest meeting gentlemen
friends in the cemetery. And yet for privacy it's about like meeting
them on the sidewalk before the Commercial Hotel. However, she's started
scandal with less material. I have business with Miss Swaim, so I'll
walk home with her."

Jerry waited for her host under the flickering, murmuring leaves of the
cottonwood. She had seen some woman wandering diagonally from the
cemetery road toward the corner of the inclosure, but she had no
interest in strangers and might never have thought of her again but for
a word of York's that day.

He had seen the girl looking after Stellar as she made a wide flank
movement. A sense of duty coupled with a strange interest in Jerry, for
which he had as yet given no account to himself, was urging him to tell
her, as he had told his sister, to have no traffic with the town's
greatest liability, but with all of Ponk's warning he could not bring
himself to speak now.

"May I sit here with you awhile?" he asked, lifting his hat as he spoke.

"Certainly. It is so quiet and peaceful out here, and, as I have no
associations with this place, I can sit here without being unhappy or
irreverent," Jerry replied.

"I came out to find you. There are callers at home now, so I'll give you
my message here, unless you want to follow Mr. Ponk's example and
'soar' off home."

"That man interests me," Jerry declared. "He said some good things about
his mother just now. And yet he's so--so funny."

"Oh, Ponk's outside is against him. If he could be husked out of himself
and let the community get down to the kernel of him he is really fine
wheat," York said, conscious the while that he had not meant, for some
reason, to praise the strutting fel