feline grace of the fellow who stood for quite a time
looking down on his stricken comrade. Then she was startled to see him
turn and raise his clenched fist in the air, his lips moving
convulsively, and she shrank from what was written on his face when he
again came softly out and mounted his horse. Ten minutes later she
watched a cloud of dust blotting the horizon on the crest of the little
rise to the north. When it had again settled, she went into her room and
came out with a pair of shears in her hand.

McVey, jaded and wan from the manipulations of the surgeon who had come
down overnight from Tin Cup, waked to find an exquisite bouquet of
freshly cut flowers in a quaint Japanese vase on the little stand beside
his bed. He had seen that vase before on the window-sill of Miss
Carter's room and he blinked incredulously at it. His wonder was only
exceeded by his embarrassment when, a few minutes later, that lady
herself in person entered the room, followed by Abigail, who bore a
platter of daintily prepared food.

"It's might good o' yuh, ma'am, too good!" he assured her in clumsy
gratefulness, as she rearranged his pillows after the refection. "But
yuh shouldn't go to so much trouble; I'd rest a heap easier in my mind
if I knowed you wasn't puttin' yuhself out none. But," reminiscently,
"that chicken soup were shore fine!"

"You shall have some every day until you are well," she beamed on him
from the doorway.

He thanked her with a gravity whose solemnity of effect was somewhat
offset by his next utterance. "Say, Miss Williams," he said seriously in
a stage aside, "when yuh cal'late I am well enough to stand it, yuh go
out an' git some other Greaser to come up here and shoot me some more!"

"Yuh shet yuah trap, Red McVey," snapped the vestal addressed
reprovingly, "an' rest yuah pore weak brain. Ain't yuh made trouble
enough already, gettin' yuhself shot up right here in thu thick o' thu
hayin' an' Ken short-handed as it was? What onaccountable idjits men is
anyway! Now yuh be good fer a spell!"

She flounced out with assumed asperity, halting at the threshold for a
last admonishing look. The big fellow, his head hung in abashment,
looked up pleadingly.

"Kiss me, mommer, an' I'll go to sleep!"

Routed horse, foot and dragoons, Abigail fled in confusion, and Red
grinned in self-complacency as Miss Carter's silvery laugh tinkled in
diminishing crescendo. Then he turned his face to the wall and really
fell