t
lover, had given her apples and candy hearts when he was in the third
grade and she learning her A, B, C. So she felt a heartache to see him
go like this. Their friendship was shattered, too. Nor had she
experience enough to know that this could not have endured, save as a
form, after the wrench he had given it. Yet she knew him well enough now
to be sure that it was his vanity and self-esteem that were hurt, and
not his love. He would soon find consolation among the other ranch
girls, upon whom he had been used to lavish his attentions at intervals
when she was not handy to receive them.

"Was Tom Dixon mean to you, teacher?"

Little five-year-old Jimmie Tryon was standing before her, feet apart,
fists knotted, and brow furrowed. She swooped upon her champion and
snatched him up for a kiss.

"Nobody has been mean to teacher, Jimmie, you dear little kiddikins,"
she cried. "It's all right, honey. Tom thinks it isn't, but before long
he'll know it is."

"Who'll tell him?" Jimmie wanted to know anxiously.

"Some nice girl, little curiosity box. I don't know who yet, but it will
be one of two or three I could name," she laughed.

She harnessed the horse and hitched it to the trap in which Jimmie and
she came to school. But before she had gathered up the reins to start,
another young man strolled upon the scene.

This one was walking and carried a rifle.

At sight of him a glow began to burn through her dark cheeks. They had
not been alone together before since that moment when the stress of
their emotion had swept them to a meeting of warm lips and warm bodies
that had startled her by the electric pulsing of her blood.

Her eyes could not hold to his. Shame dragged the lashes down.

With him it was not shame. The male in him rode triumphant because he
had moved a girl to the deeps of her nature. But something in him, some
saving sense of embarrassment, of reverence for the purity and innocence
he sensed in her, made him shrink from pressing the victory. His mind
cast about for a commonplace with which to meet her.

He held up as a trophy of his prowess two cottontails. "Who says I can't
shoot?" he wanted to know boisterously.

"Where did you buy them?" she scoffed, faintly trying for sauciness.

"That's a fine reward for honest virtue, after I tramped five miles to
get them for your supper," protested Keller.

She recovered her composure quickly, as women will.

"If they are for my supper, we'll have to