with lips still stubbornly locked, he
died without "snitching on a pal."

Under fire in the dark cabin with life grown suddenly tense for them,
Bud Lee and Judith Sanford had touched hands lingeringly. No one who
knew them guessed it; certainly one of them, perhaps both, sought to
forget it. There had been that strange thrill which comes sometimes
when a man's hand and a woman's meet. Bud Lee grunted at the memory of
it; Judith, remembering, blushed scarlet. For, at that moment of deep,
sympathetic understanding touched with the romance which young life
will draw even from a dark night fraught with danger, there had been in
Bud Lee's heart but an acceptance, eager as it was, of a "pardner."
For the time being he thought of her--or, rather, he thought that he
thought of her, as a man would think of a companion of his own sex. He
approved of her. But he did not approve of her as a girl, as a woman.

He had said: "There are two kinds of women." And Judith, knowing that
his ideal was an impossible but poetic She, rich in subtle feminine
graces, steeped in that vague charm of her sex like a rose in its own
perfume, had accepted his friendship during a dark hour, allowing
herself to forget that upon the morrow, if morrow came to them at all,
he would hold her in that gentle scorn of his.

"A narrow-minded, bigoted fool!" she cried in the seclusion of her
bedroom. "I'll show you where you get off, Mr. Bud Lee! Just you
wait."

When she and Lee met, she looked him straight in the eye with marked
coolness, oddly aloof, and Lee, lifting his hat, was stiff and
short-worded.

In the long, quiet hours which came during the few days following the
end of a fruitless search for Quinnion and Shorty, he had ample time to
analyze his own emotion. He liked her; from the bottom of his heart he
liked her. But she was not the lady of his dreams. She rode like a
man, she shot like a man, she gave her orders like a man. She was
efficient. She was as square as a die; under fire she was a pardner
for any man. But she was not a little lady to be thought of
sentimentally. He wondered what she would look like if she shed boots
and broad hat and riding-habit and appeared before a man in an evening
gown--"all lacy and ribbony, you know." He couldn't picture her that
way; he couldn't imagine her dallying, as the lady of his dreams
dallied, in an atmosphere of rose-leaves, perhaps a volume of Tennyson
on her knee.

"Shucks!" h