gs into this world's gloom, to
drive away the shadows that draped it like a mist. Perhaps Vesta stood
there tonight sending her soul out in a call to someone for whom she
longed, these comfortable, natural, womanly hopes in her own good heart.

He sighed, wishing her well of such hope if she had it, and forgot her
in a moment as his eyes picked up a light far across the hills. Now it
twinkled brightly, now it wavered and died, as if its beam was all too
weak to hold to the continued effort of projecting itself so far. That
must be the Kerr ranch; no other habitation lay in that direction.
Perhaps in the light of that lamp somebody was sitting, bending a dark
head in pensive tenderness with a thought of him.

He stood with his pleasant fancy, his dream around him like a cloak. All
the trouble that was in the world for him that hour was near the earth,
like the precipitation of settling waters. Over it he gazed, superior to
its ugly murk, careless of whether it might rise to befoul the clear
current of his hopes, or sink and settle to obscure his dreams no more.

There was a sound of falling shale on the slope, following the
disturbance of a quick foot. Vesta was coming. Unseen and unheard
through the insulation of his thoughts, she had approached within ten
rods of him before he saw her, the moonlight on her fair face, glorious
in her uncovered hair.

CHAPTER XX

BUSINESS, AND MORE

"You stand out like an Indian water monument up here," she said
reprovingly, as she came scrambling up, taking the hand that he hastened
forward to offer and boost her over the last sharp face of crumbling
shale.

"I expect Hargus could pick me off from below there anywhere, but I
didn't think of that," he said.

"It wouldn't be above him," seriously, discounting the light way in
which he spoke of it; "he's done things just as cowardly, and so have
others you've met."

"I haven't got much opinion of the valor of men who hunt in packs,
Vesta. Some of them might be skulking around, glad to take a shot at us.
Don't you think we'd better go down?"

"We can sit over there and be off the sky-line. It's always the safe
thing to do around here."

She indicated a point where an inequality in the hill would be above
their heads sitting, and there they composed themselves--the sheltering
swell of hilltop at their backs.

"It's not a very complimentary reflection on a civilized community that
one has to take such a precaution, but