she said. He laughed, but she shook her
head.

"Comedy," he answered, "except your part of it, which you shouldn't have
done. It was not arranged in honor of 'visiting ladies.' But you
mustn't think me a comedian. Truly, I didn't plan it. My friend from
Six-Cross-Roads must be given the credit of devising the scene-though
you divined it!"

"It was a little too picturesque, I think. I know about Six-Cross-Roads.
Please tell me what you mean to do."

"Nothing. What should I?"

"You mean that you will keep on letting them shoot at you, until
they--until you--" She struck the bench angrily with her hand.

"There's no summer theatre in Six-Cross-Roads; there's not even a
church. Why shouldn't they?" he asked gravely. "During the long and
tedious evenings it cheers the poor Cross-Reader's soul to drop over
here and take a shot at me. It whiles away dull care for him, and he has
the additional exercise of running all the way home."

"Ah!" she cried indignantly, "they told me you always answered like
this!"

"Well, you see the Cross-Roads efforts have proved so purely hygienic
for me. As a patriot I have sometimes felt extreme mortification that
such bad marksmanship should exist in the county, but I console
myself with the thought that their best shots are unhappily in the
penitentiary."

"There are many left. Can't you understand that they will organize again
and come in a body, as they did before you broke them up? And then, if
they come on a night when they know you are wandering out of town----"

"You have not the advantage of an intimate study of the most exclusive
people of the Cross-Roads, Miss Sherwood. There are about twenty
gentlemen who remain in that neighborhood while their relatives sojourn
under discipline. If you had the entree over there, you would understand
that these twenty could not gather themselves into a company and march
the seven miles without physical debate in the ranks. They are not
precisely amiable people, even amongst themselves. They would quarrel
and shoot each other to pieces long before they got here."

"But they worked in a company once."

"Never for seven miles. Four miles was their radius. Five would see them
all dead."

She struck the bench again. "Oh, you laugh at me! You make a joke of
your own life and death, and laugh at everything! Have five years of
Plattville taught you to do that?"

"I laugh only at taking the poor Cross-Roaders too seriously. I don't
laugh at