man to toss a handkerchief into the
fire and let them ponder on the act's significance. The act may have
been foolhardy and certainly had the youthful flavour of bravado; none
the less in her eyes the man achieved through it a sort of magnificence.

He stood looking at her very gravely and gravely she returned the look.
And it was borne in upon the girl's inner consciousness that now and for
the first time in her life she had come face to face with a man
absolutely without guile or the need thereof. He was in character as he
was in physique, or she read him wrongly. He thought his thought
straight out and made no pretence of hiding it for the simple and
sufficient reason that there was in all the universe no slightest need
of hiding it. As she looked straight back into his eyes little flashes
of impressions which had fastened upon her mind during the day came back
to her, things which he suggested, which were like him. She was very
tired and further she was overwrought from the nervous excitement of the
evening; hence her mental processes were the quicker and more prone to
fly off at wild tangents.... She had seen a tall, rugged cedar on a
rocky ridge blown through by the tempest, standing out in clear relief
against the sky; this man recalled the scene, the very atmosphere. She
had seen a wild swollen torrent hurtling on its way down the
mountainside; the man had threatened to become like that, headlong with
unbounded passion, fierce and destructive when a moment ago they opposed
him.... Again she bit her lip; she was thinking of this huge male
creature in hyperboles. Yes; she was overwrought; it was not well to
think thusly of any mere male creature.

And yet she but liked him the better and her fancies were smitten anew
by what he did now. Having filled his eyes with her as a man athirst may
fill himself with water from a brook, he turned abruptly away and left
her. He did not tarry to say "Thank you," that she had been almost eager
in asserting her belief in his innocence. He did not go back to a futile
and perhaps quarrelsome discussion with Hap Smith and old man Adams and
the rest. He simply dropped everything where it was, shoved his big
revolver out of sight under his left arm-pit and went to the long dining
table. There, his back to the room, he helped himself generously to cold
meat, bread and luke-warm coffee and ate hungrily.

She sank back into her chair and let her eyes wander to his breadth of
shoulder,