nt to talk to you about. Let's go over
yonder and sit down in the sun."

The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the
up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and
the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry
leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned
out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed
away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in
the new order.

In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly
apprehending; that some of his keenest pains--most of them, perhaps--did
not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the
listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there
be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king's load.

His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed
when he had reached a stopping-place.

"They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain't got much
sense, it looks like to me," was her comment. "You're a man growed now,
Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all
business is it o' their'n?"

He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the
significance of it struck him fairly. But it betokened allegiance of a
kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the
declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.

"You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don't you, girl?" he said,
in sheerest self-gratulation. "That's what I like in you. You asked me a
little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a
man of me, Nan, if you'd try."

He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came
over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it,
and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed
and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when
Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.

"If you'd said that two year ago," she began, in a half-whisper that
melted the marrow in his bones. "But you was on'y a boy then; and now I
reckon it's too late."

"You mean that you don't care for me any more, Nan? I know better than
that. You'd back me if I had come up here to tell you that I'd killed
somebody. Wouldn't you, now?"

He waited overlong for his answer. There were so