s defeat of Wyatt, he took it
with a smile and as a matter of course. He had found it an easy thing to
rout Wyatt. Wyatt had stirred his fighting blood; and everything
pertinent to the discussion had come to his mind in the heat of the
debate....

And now we began to hear the sound of a fiddle, scraped in a loose and
erratic fashion and giving forth an occasional note of a tune. I looked
around and saw Lamborn sitting in the doorway of the hut. Zoe was near
him, laughing at his half-drunken attempts to manage the instrument.
Douglas looked up. A quick smile shot across his face. He glanced into
my eyes in a searching manner which mystified me and sent a sudden
thrill through me. What was he thinking? Surely he knew of my relation
to Zoe. I caught out of his expression the prejudice of the time against
the social equality that I was maintaining in standing by Zoe and having
her with me. I had not shirked my heritage. Perhaps Douglas admired me
too much to speak what was in his mind; or perhaps he was too much of
the politician to trench upon ground so personal. At all events, we
were silent for a moment. And then Douglas called to Lamborn. It was
time to go. Lamborn rose to his feet, swaying a little as he did so, and
came to where we sat. He looked me over in a scrutinizing way, then shot
forth his hand for me to take it. It was an awkward act and out of
place! Yet I felt compelled to give him my hand. And with good-bys they
bestrode their horses and were gone. I began to have ominous
reflections.

I went to the hut and asked Zoe what Lamborn had been saying to her. She
laughed and seemed reluctant to tell me. I pressed her then; and she
said that he had followed her through the house and tried to kiss her;
that she had come around to the front door so as to be in sight of
Douglas and me; then that Lamborn had taken the fiddle down and had
begun to play it.

All the possibilities of Lamborn's attitude dawned on me instantly. How
dearly might I pay in some way for my father's desire to be rich! If
Douglas had taken his initial hurt in life from his uncle's failure to
educate him, I had begun the weaving of my destiny with these threads
which my father had bequeathed to me. What would my complications be if
Zoe eloped with a wild fellow like Lamborn, bringing his personality
into the texture of my affairs; the matter of this land, and Zoe's
interest in it? I could sense ahead an unending difficulty, an ever
deepening