course." It was Park, still trying to be polite and not
commit himself on the subject of Jack. The "some one" whom Jack went
oftenest to see was the bartender in the Palace saloon, but it was not
necessary to tell her that.

"The river's coming up pretty fast, Mona," he ventured. "Don't yuh think
yuh ought to pull out and go visiting?"

"No, I don't." Mona's tone was very decided. "I wouldn't drop down on a
neighbor without warning just because the river happens to be coming up.
It has 'come up' every June since we've been living here, and there have
been several of them. At the worst it never came inside the gate."

"You can never tell what it might do," Park argued. "Yuh know yourself
there's never been so much snow in the mountains. This hot weather we've
been having lately, and then the rain, will bring it a-whooping. Can't
yuh ride over to the Jonses? One of us'll go with yuh."

"No, I can't." Mona's chin went up perversely. "I'm no coward, I hope,
even if there was any danger which there isn't."

Thurston's chin went up also, and he sat a bit straighter. Whether she
meant it or not, he took her words as a covert stab at himself. Probably
she did not mean it; at any rate the blood flew consciously to her
cheeks after she had spoken, and she caught her under lip sharply
between her teeth. And that did not help matters or make her temper more
yielding.

"Anyway," she added hurriedly, "Jack will be here; he's likely to come
any minute now."

"Uh course, if Jack's got some new kind of half-hitch he can put on
the river and hold it back yuh'll be all right," fleered Park, with the
freedom of an old friend. He had known Mona when she wore dresses to her
shoe-tops and her hair in long, brown curls down her back.

She wrinkled her nose at him also with the freedom of an old friend and
Thurston stirred restlessly in his chair. He did not like even Park to
be too familiar with Mona, though he knew there was a girl in Shellanne
whose name Park sometimes spoke in his sleep.

She lifted the big glass lamp down from its place on the clock shelf
and lighted it with fingers not quite steady. "You men," she remarked,
"think women ought to be wrapped in pink cotton and put in a glass
cabinet. If, by any miracle, the river should come up around the house,
I flatter myself I should be able to cope with the situation. I'd just
saddle my horse and ride out to high ground!"

"Would yuh?" Park grinned skeptically. "The road fr