track of me."

"But this is America, Mr. Armitage!"

"That does not help me with you. You have every reason to resent my
bringing you into such dangers,--it is unpardonable--indefensible!"

She saw that he was greatly troubled.

"But you couldn't help my being in the park to-day! I have often stopped
just there before. It's a favorite place for meditations. If you know the
man--"

"I know the man."

"Then the law will certainly protect you, as you know very well. He was a
dreadful-looking person. The police can undoubtedly find and lock him
up."

She was seeking to minimize the matter,--to pass it off as a commonplace
affair of every day. They were walking their horses; the groom followed
stolidly behind.

Armitage was silent, a look of great perplexity on his face. When he
spoke he was quite calm.

"Miss Claiborne, I must tell you that this is an affair in which I can't
ask help in the usual channels. You will pardon me if I seem to make a
mystery of what should be ordinarily a bit of business between myself and
the police; but to give publicity to these attempts to injure me just now
would be a mistake. I could have caught that man there in the wood; but I
let him go, for the reason--for the reason that I want the men back of
him to show themselves before I act. But if it isn't presuming--"

He was quite himself again. His voice was steady and deep with the ease
and assurance that she liked in him. She had marked to-day in his
earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost
indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.

"How am I to know whether it would be presuming?" she asked.

"But I was going to say--"

"When rudely interrupted!" She was trying to make it easy for him to say
whatever he wished.

"--that these troubles of mine are really personal. I have committed no
crime and am not fleeing from justice."

She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road
near the park limits.

"How uninteresting! We expect a Montana ranchman to have a spectacular
past."

"But not to carry it, I hope, to Washington. On the range I might become
a lawless bandit in the interest of picturesqueness; but here--"

"Here in the world of frock-coated statesmen nothing really interesting
is to be expected."

She walked her horse again. It occurred to her that he might wish an
assurance of silence from her. What she had seen would make a capital bit
of gossip, to s