till you hoed up here. I don't believe I'll
ever get over feeling that way, and I am not going to give up. I'm going
to keep hoping."

"There goes my towel!" Dixie said, as she laid her hoe across her
shoulder. "I must go. Don't follow me, Hank. I don't want her, or
anybody else, to see me out here with you."

"Then come out to the fence this evening, after supper, won't you, just
a minute?"

"No, I can't--I never leave the house after dark. They need me at home."

"Blast them, what have they got to do with you? You are already a slave
to them. Well, good-bye. You'll change your mind some day."

He held out his hand with a smile, but she refused to take it.

"You won't even shake hands. Why, what is the matter with you? I can see
that you are mad at me by the twitching of--Do you know, Dixie, you have
the most maddening mouth and lips that a woman ever owned? Say, shake
just once to show that we are friends."

"I won't. I did it once and you held me and tried to kiss me. I'll tell
you now in dead earnest, Hank, you must never try that sort of a thing
again. I mean it, as God is my judge, I do."

"I never will while you hold a hoe in your grip," he jested, with a
thwarted smile, as she turned from him.

He stepped back to his gun and stood watching her as she plodded
homeward. "I can't help it," he said, a dark, desperate look on his
face. "I simply can't quit thinking about her. I've got staying
qualities, and no man ever gained his point that paid the slightest
attention to a woman's moods. Right now she may be wishing she'd gone to
the picnic."

CHAPTER IV

"Jim, how's your courting getting on?" Henley asked his clerk, half
teasingly, one sultry afternoon, as the two were finishing a game of
checkers on a board from which the squares were almost obliterated by
the constant sliding of the black and white pants-buttons which were
used for checkers.

"Don't ask me, Alf," Cahews answered, with a sickly smile. "I'm afraid
she's too much for me. We ain't a bit nigher the altar than we was a
year ago when I begun. Sometimes I think she is willing, and then ag'in
I don't."

"I kinder thought you looked worried the last time you took her to
ride," said Henley, sympathetically. "I felt sorry for you. She looked
mighty chipper in her finery as you whisked by, but you was down in the
mouth. Looked like you was on duty, and that was all."

"Somehow I don't much blame her," Cahews sighed, "but it looks to