the harshness of strain and anger gone out of her
face. He offered her his hand, the only expression of his appreciation
for her generous decision that came to him in the gratefulness of the
moment. She took it as if to seal a compact between them.

"You've come back to be a woman again," he said, hardly realizing how
strange his words might seem to her, expressing the one thought that
came to the front.

"I suppose I didn't act much like a woman out there a while ago," she
admitted, her old expression of sadness darkening in her eyes.

"You were a couple of wildcats," he told her. "Maybe we can get on here
now without fighting, but if they come crowding it on let us men-folks
take care of it for you; it's no job for a girl."

"I'm going to put the thought of it out of my mind, feud, fences,
everything--and turn it all over to you. It's asking a lot of you to
assume, but I'm tired to the heart."

"I'll do the best by you I can as long as I'm here," he promised,
simply. He started on; she rode forward with him.

"If she comes back again, what will you do?"

"I'll try to show her where she's wrong, and maybe I can get her to hang
up her gun, too. You ought to be friends, it seems to me--a couple of
neighbor girls like you."

"We couldn't be that," she said, loftily, her old coldness coming over
her momentarily, "but if we can live apart in peace it will be
something. Don't trust her, Mr. Lambert, don't take her word for
anything. There's no honor in the Kerr blood; you'll find that out for
yourself. It isn't in one of them to be even a disinterested friend."

There was nothing for him to say to this, spoken so seriously that it
seemed almost a prophecy. He felt as if she had looked into the window
of his heart and read his secret and, in her old enmity for this slim
girl of the dangling braid of hair, was working subtly to raise a
barrier of suspicion and distrust between them.

"I'll go on home and quit bothering you," she said.

"You're no bother to me, Vesta; I like to have you along."

She stopped, looked toward the place where she had lately ridden through
the fence in vengeful pursuit of her enemy, her eyes inscrutable, her
face sad.

"I never felt it so lonesome out here as it is today," she said, and
turned her horse, and left him.

He looked back more than once as he rode slowly along the fence, a mist
before his perception that he could not pierce. What had come over Vesta
to change her so compl