t," she added,
firmly.

"Did he speak to you--are you engaged?"

Her head drooped. "Not really engaged, mother; but he told me how much he
liked me--and--it's all right, mother, I _know_ it is. I'm not fine
enough for him, but I'm going to try to change my ways so he won't be
ashamed of me."

Mrs. McFarlane's face cleared. "He surely is a fine young fellow, and can
be trusted to do the right thing. Well, we might as well go to bed. We
can't settle anything till your father gets home," she said.

Wayland rose next morning free from dizziness and almost free from pain,
and when he came out of his room his expression was cheerful. "I feel as
if I'd slept a week, and I'm hungry. I don't know why I should be, but I
am."

Mrs. McFarlane met him with something very intimate, something almost
maternal in her look; but her words were as few and as restrained as
ever. He divined that she had been talking with Berrie, and that a fairly
clear understanding of the situation had been reached. That this
understanding involved him closely he was aware; but nothing in his
manner acknowledged it.

She did not ask any questions, believing that sooner or later the whole
story must come out. The fact that Siona Moore and Mrs. Belden knew that
Berrie had started back on Thursday with young Norcross made it easy for
the villagers to discover that she had not reached the ranch till
Saturday. "What could Joe have been thinking of to allow them to go?" she
said. "Mr. Nash's presence in the camp must be made known; but then there
is Clifford's assault upon Mr. Norcross, can that be kept secret, too?"
And so while the young people chatted, the troubled mother waited in
fear, knowing that in a day or two the countryside would be aflame with
accusation.

In a landscape like this, as she well knew, nothing moves unobserved. The
native--man or woman--is able to perceive and name objects scarcely
discernible to the eye of the alien. A minute speck is discovered on the
hillside. "Hello, there's Jim Sanders on his roan," says one, or "Here
comes Kit Jenkins with her flea-bit gray. I wonder who's on the bay
alongside of her," remarks another, and each of these observations is
taken quite as a matter of course. With a wide and empty field of vision,
and with trained, unspoiled optic nerves, the plainsman is marvelously
penetrating of glance. Hence, Mrs. McFarlane was perfectly certain that
not one but several of her neighbors had seen and recogniz