a."

"Thank you, Duke."

Lambert sat turning over in his mind something that he wanted to say to
her, but which he could not yet shape to his tongue. She was looking in
the direction of the light that he had been watching, a gleam of which
showed faintly now and then, as if between moving boughs.

"I don't like the notion of your leaving this country whipped, Vesta,"
he said, coming to it at last.

"I don't like to leave it whipped, Duke."

"That's the way they'll look at it if you go."

Silence again, both watching the far-distant, twinkling light.

"I laid out the job for myself of bringing these outlaws around here up
to your fence with their hats in their hands, and I hate to give it up
before I've made good on my word."

"Let it go, Duke; it isn't worth the fight."

"A man's word is either good for all he intends it to be, or worth no
more than the lowest scoundrel's, Vesta. If I don't put up works to
equal what I've promised, I'll have to sneak out of this country between
two suns."

"I threw off too much on the shoulders of a willing and gallant
stranger," she sighed. "Let it go, Duke; I've made up my mind to sell
out and leave."

He made no immediate return to this declaration, but after a while he
said:

"This will be a mighty bleak spot with the house abandoned and dark on
winter nights and no stock around the barns."

"Yes, Duke."

"There's no place so lonesome as one where somebody's lived, and put his
hopes and ambitions into it, and gone away and left it empty. I can hear
the winter wind cuttin' around the house down yonder, mournin' like a
widow woman in the night."

A sob broke from her, a sudden, sharp, struggling expression of her
sorrow for the desolation that he pictured in his simple words. She bent
her head into her hands and cried. Lambert was sorry for the pain that
he had unwittingly stirred in her breast, but glad in a glowing
tenderness to see that she had this human strain so near the surface
that it could be touched by a sentiment so common, and yet so precious,
as the love of home. He laid his hand on her head, stroking her soft,
wavy hair.

"Never mind, Vesta," he petted, as if comforting a child. "Maybe we can
fix things up here so there'll be somebody to take care of it. Never
mind--don't you grieve and cry."

"It's home--the only home I ever knew. There's no place in the world
that can be to me what it has been, and is."

"That's so, that's so. I remember, I kno