upright,
and with a merciless hand turned her face so that the moonlight struck
it full. They stared at each other, breathing hard from more than the
race they had run.

"Well--I'll--be--" Grant began, in blank amazement.

She wriggled her chin in his palm, trying to free herself from his
pitiless staring. Failing that, she began to sob angrily without any
tears in her wide eyes.

"You--shot me, you brute!" she cried accusingly at last. "You--SHOT me!"
And she sobbed again.

Before he answered, he drew backward a step or two, sat down upon the
edge of a rock which had rolled out from a stone-heap, and pulled her
down beside him, still holding her fast, as if he half believed her
capable of soaring away over the treetops, after all.

"I guess I didn't murder you--from the chase you gave me. Did I hit you
at all?"

"Yes, you did! You nearly broke my arm--and you might have killed me,
you big brute! Look what you did--and I never harmed you at all!" She
pushed up a sleeve, and held out her arm accusingly in the moonlight,
disclosing a tiny, red furrow where the skin was broken and still
bleeding. "And you shot a big hole right through Aunt Phoebe's sheet!"
she added, with tearful severity.

He caught her arm, bent his head over it--and for a moment he was
perilously near to kissing it; an impulse which astonished him
considerably, and angered him more. He dropped the arm rather
precipitately; and she lifted it again, and regarded the wound with
mournful interest.

"I'd like to know what right you have to prowl around shooting at
people," she scolded, seeing how close she could come to touching the
place with her fingertips without producing any but a pleasurable pain.

"Just as much right as you have to get up in the middle of the night
and go ahowling all over the ranch wrapped up in a sheet," he retorted
ungallantly.

"Well, if I want to do it, I don't see why you need concern yourself
about it. I wasn't doing it for your benefit, anyway."

"Will you tell me what you DID do it for? Of all the silly tomfoolery--"

An impish smile quite obliterated the Christmas-angel look for an
instant, then vanished, and left her a pretty, abused maiden who is
grieved at harsh treatment.

"Well, I wanted to scare Gene," she confessed. "I did, too. I just know
he's a cowardy-cat, because he's always trying to scare ME. It's Gene's
fault--he told me the grove is haunted. He said a long time ago, before
Uncle Hart settled