helping
hand, and that two voices with precisely the same anxious intonation
were saying,--

"Be ye hurt?"

It was a solemn moment, but Cynthia Gardner was of the stuff that
recognizes opportunity. She laid a hand upon each rugged arm, and
steadied herself between them; she perceived that they trembled under
her touch, and she felt that the instant in which they stood side by
side was dramatic.

"I declare, 'twas too bad," said Reuben.

"'Twas too bad," said Stephen.

"Is the horse all right?" asked Cynthia, feebly.

"Yes, Johnny Allen got him," said Stephen.

"Johnny Allen came along," said Reuben, as if Stephen had not spoken,
"and he's got him."

"I can walk," she said, with not unconscious pathos, "if you will walk
with me, but I must go in and rest a moment;" and the three moved slowly
straight forward.

A few steps brought them to the point at which they must turn aside to
reach either entrance. Before them rose the old boarded-up, dismal
doorway, weather-beaten, stained, repellent as bitterness. There was
another fateful pause. Cynthia felt the quiver that ran through the
frames of the old men as for the first time in long years they stood
side by side before the doorway about which as children they had played,
and through which as boys they had rushed together. In Cynthia's
drooping head plans were rapidly forming themselves, but she had time to
be thankful that she did not know which was Reuben and which was
Stephen--it saved her the anxiety of decision; instinctively she turned
to the right, a small brown hand clutching impartially either rough and
shabby sleeve.

The man on her right swerved in an impulse of desertion, but her grasp
did not relax.

"Is the judgment of Solomon to be pronounced!" she said to herself, half
hysterically, for her nerves were a little shaken.

"Oh, I hope I sha'n't faint!" she exclaimed aloud.

Beneath Reuben's rustic exterior beat the American heart that cannot
desert an elegant female in distress. He followed the inclination of the
other two to Stephen's door, and in another never-to-be-forgotten moment
he stepped inside his brother's house.

Stephen's deceased wife's niece was so overcome by the spectacle that
she retained barely enough presence of mind to drag forward a wooden
chair upon which Cynthia sank in a condition evidently bordering upon
syncope. It was a critical moment; she must not give the intruder an
opportunity to escape. She knew the intruder