ready at the barrel-spring, as an
indistinct murmur of voices testified. The girl had another trembling
fit when she heard them, and Tom's wonder was fast lapsing into contempt
or something like it.

"Oh-h-h!" she shuddered. "Do you reckon they saw us, Tom-Jeff?"

"I shouldn't wonder," he whispered back unfeelingly. "We could see them
plain enough."

"He'll kill me, for shore, Tom-Jeff! O God!"

Tom's lip curled. The wolf does not mate with the jackal. Not all her
beauty could atone for such spiritless cringing. Love would have pitied
her, but passion is not moved by qualities opposite to those which have
evoked it.

"Then you know them--or one of them, at least," he said. "Who is he?"

She would not tell; and since the murmur of voices was still plainly
audible, she begged in dumb-show for silence. Whereupon Tom shut his
mouth and did not open it again until the sound of the voices had died
away and the fainter tappings of the hammers on the pipe-line advertised
the retreat of the inspection party.

"They're gone now," he said shortly. "Let's get out of here before we
stifle."

But a second time ill chance intervened. Tom had a leg over the brink
and was looking for a soft leaf bed to drop into, when the baying of a
hound broke on the restored quiet of the mountain side. "Oh, dang it
all!" said Tom heartily, and drew back into hiding.

The girl's ague fit of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned
about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is
the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in
Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the
Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible
cost of her good name. And Nan's word did not help matters.

"What makes you so cross to me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked, when he drew back
with the impatient exclamation. "I hain't done nothin' to make you let
on like you hate me, have I?"

"I don't hate you," said Tom, frowning. "If I did, I shouldn't care."
Just then the hound burst out of the laurel thicket on the brow of the
lower slope, running with its nose to the ground, and he added: "That's
Japhe Pettigrass's dog; I hope to goodness he isn't anywhere behind it."

But the horse-trader was behind the dog; so close behind that he came
out on the continuation of the pipe-line path while the hound was still
nosing among the leaves where Tom had lain sunning himself and telling
h