ired. "Tell me about these people," he said.

"What people, Mr. Burleson? My own?"

Her sensitive instinct had followed the little drama from her
vantage-seat on the knoll; she had seen the patrol display the belt; she
had watched the color die out and then flood the young man's face and
neck; and she had read the surface signs of the murderous fury that
altered his own visage to a mask set with a pair of blazing eyes. And
suddenly, as he dropped to the ground beside her, his question had swept
aside formality, leaving them on the very edge of an intimacy which she
had accepted, unconsciously, with her low-voiced answer.

"Yes--your own people. Tell what I should know I want to live in peace
among them if they'll let me."

She gathered her knees in her clasped fingers and looked out into the
forest. "Mr. Burleson," she said, "for every mental, every moral
deformity, man is answerable to man. You dwellers in the pleasant places
of the world are pitiless in your judgment of the sullen, suspicious,
narrow life you find edging forests, clinging to mountain flanks, or
stupidly stifling in the heart of some vast plain. I cannot understand
the mental cruelty which condemns with contempt human creatures who have
had no chance--not one single chance. Are they ignorant? Then bear with
them for shame! Are they envious, grasping, narrow? Do they gossip about
neighbors, do they slander without mercy? What can you expect from
starved minds, human intellects unnourished by all that you find so
wholesome? Man's progress only inspires man; man's mind alone stimulates
man's mind. Where civilization is, there are many men; where is the
greatest culture, the broadest thought, the sweetest toleration, there
men are many, teaching one another unconsciously, consciously, always
advancing, always uplifting, spite of the shallow tide of sin which
flows in the footsteps of all progress--"

She ceased; her delicate, earnest face relaxed, and a smile glimmered
for a moment in her eyes, in the pretty curled corners of her parted
lips.

"I'm talking very like a school-marm," she said. "I am one, by-the-way,
and I teach the children of these people--_my_ people," she added, with
an exquisite hint of defiance in her smile.

She rested her weight on one arm and leaned towards him a trifle.

"In Fox Cross-roads there is much that is hopeless, much that is
sorrowful, Mr. Burleson; there is hunger, bodily hunger; there is
sickness unsolaced by sp