urse over and over in her hands, looking at it without much
interest. She seemed in no hurry to ride on, which gave Lone courage.

"There's something I'd like to say," he began, groping for words that
would make his meaning plain without telling too much. "I hope you won't
mind my telling you. You were kinda out of your head when I found you,
and you said something about seeing a man shot and----"

"Oh!" Lorraine looked up at him, looked through him, he thought, with
those brilliant eyes of hers. "Then I did tell----"

"I just wanted to say," Lone interrupted her, "that I knew all the time
it was just a nightmare. I never mentioned it to anybody, and you'll
forget all about it, I hope. You didn't tell any one else, did you?"

He looked up at her again and found her studying him curiously. "You're
not the man I saw," she said, as if she were satisfying herself on that
point. "I've wondered since--but I was sure, too, that I had seen it.
Why mustn't I tell any one?"

Lone did not reply at once. The girl's eyes were disconcertingly direct,
her voice and her manner disturbed him with their judicial calmness, so
at variance with the wildness he remembered.

"Well, it's hard to explain," he said at last. "You're strange to this
country, and you don't know all the ins and outs of--things. It wouldn't
do any good to you or anybody else, and it might do a lot of harm." His
eyes nicked her face with a wistful glance. "You don't know me--I really
haven't got any right to ask or expect you to trust me. But I wish you
would, to the extent of forgetting that you saw--or thought you
saw--anything that night in Rock City."

Lorraine shivered and covered her eyes swiftly with one hand. His words
had brought back too sharply that scene. But she shook off the emotion
and faced him again.

"I saw a man murdered," she cried. "I wasn't sure afterwards; sometimes
I thought I had dreamed it. But I was sure I saw it. I saw the horse go
by, running--and you want me to keep still about that? What harm could
it do to tell? Perhaps it's true--perhaps I did see it all. I might
think you were trying to cover up something--only, you're not the man I
saw--or thought I saw."

"No, of course I'm not. You dreamed the whole thing, and the way you
talked to me was so wild, folks would say you're crazy if they heard you
tell it. You're a stranger here, Miss Hunter, and--your father is not as
popular in this country as he might be. He's got enemies t