from childhood and would eat anything on earth. She rode him
up here once and he nabbed a bar of laundry soap off the back porch and
chewed the whole thing down with tears of ecstasy in his eyes and
frothing at the mouth like a mad dog. Well, so Hetty gives mister man a
look of dainty superiority as she flicks crumbs from her white fingers
with my real lace handkerchief, and he stops his hearty laughter and
just stares, and she says what nonsense to think the poor horses don't
like food as well as any one. Them little moments have their effect on a
man in a certain condition. He knew there probably wasn't another horse
in the world would touch that truck, but he couldn't help feeling a
strange new respect for her in addition to that glorious masculine
protection she'd had him wallowing in all day.

"The ride home, at least on the part of the Non Plush Ultra cut-ups, was
like they had laid a loved one to final rest out there on the lone
mountainside. The handsome stranger and Hetty brought up the rear,
conversing eagerly about themselves and other serious topics. I believe
he give her to understand that he'd been pretty wild at one time in his
life and wasn't any too darned well over it yet, but that some good
womanly woman who would study his ways could still take him and make a
man of him; and her answering that she knew he must have suffered beyond
human endurance in that horrible conflict with his lower nature. He said
he had.

"Of course the rabid young hoydens up ahead made a feeble effort now and
then to carry it off lightly, and from time to time sang 'My Bonnie Lies
Over the Ocean,' or 'Merrily We Roll Along,' with the high, squeaky
tenor of Roth Hyde sounding above the others very pretty in the
moonlight, but it was poor work as far as these enraged vestals was
concerned. If I'd been Hetty and had got a strange box of candy through
the mail the next week, directed in a disguised woman's hand, I'd of
rushed right off to the police with it, not waiting for any analysis.
And she, poor thing, would get so frightened at bad spots, with the
fierce old horse bobbing about so dangerous, that she just has to be
held on. And once she wrenched her ankle against a horrid old tree on
the trail--she hadn't been able to resist a little one--and bit her
under lip as the spasm of pain passed over her refined features. But she
was all right in a minute and begged Mr. D. not to think of bathing it
in cold water because it was n