d in astonishment, recognizing
her at once.

"Nothing, only I was waiting for you," Ruth answered.

Jim had ridden close up to her. Now he leaned down from his horse and
lifted her up in the saddle with him. "Let's don't go in to the house
now, Ruth," he whispered. "I want to ride with you, alone."

Ruth did not have to speak, for she yielded herself utterly to Jim's
strength and tenderness. With a touch to his horse the man and woman
rode on, feeling the night wind of the prairies with its thousand
fragrances blow over them; seeing the sky with its ten million stars
above them and the great wide sweep of the open country beneath.

"It has been more than a week, Ruth, and I am weary of waiting," Jim
said, when his horse grew tired and they were moving toward home.

She turned her face toward him, flushed now with the joy of the night
and the stars and the new love that enthralled her. "You know I love
you, Jim," she murmured caressingly, "and I would rather be your wife
than any man's in the world."

After this there did not seem to be need for speech; but the man walked
his horse slowly, hoping that it might take forever before they reached
home.

Then Ruth said carelessly, because the tramp's story had passed out of
her thoughts until this moment: "Jim, don't be angry--I didn't want to
listen, but you must make that fellow, Joe Dawson, stop telling dreadful
stories about you. Why, I met him to-night and he told me such absurd
things. He said----"

Suddenly the man's arm stiffened about the woman he loved. "He said
what, Ruth?" Jim Colter inquired with a new note in his voice.

Ruth laughed nervously and clung more closely to him, as though she
feared to slip from her seat. "Just that your name was John Carter and
not Jim Colter. Please don't make me tell you any more of his stories,"
she begged.

"I would like to hear all, Ruth; it will be better for us in the end,"
Jim insisted.

"But I'm ashamed," the girl argued, "because it is so utterly unlike you
or anything you could do. You know, I believe you are the soul of honor,
Jim, yet this man said you had stolen money when you were a young man,
and run away from home to hide."

"The man told you the truth, Ruth," Jim Colter answered. "Don't be
frightened. I have done wrong, for I should have told you before. My
name is John Carter under the law, though I have borne the name of Jim
Colter for fourteen years and it seems far more like my own name than
the