y, still smiling, and he saw that
she had not heard a single word of his passionate speech. He sprang up,
hot with anger and pain.

"If you don't care to listen to me you needn't," he said, speaking
through his clinched teeth.

She smiled, showing her little white teeth prettily. "Now, don't get
mad, Harry; I was thinking of something else. Please tell me again."

"I won't. I'm done with you." A big lump arose in his throat and he
turned away to hide tears of mortified pride. He could not have put it
into words, but he perceived the painful truth. Dot had considered him a
boy all along, and had only half listened to his stories and plans in
the past, deceiving him for some purpose of her own. She was a smiling,
careless hypocrite.

"You've lied to me," he said, turning and speaking with the bluntness of
a boy without subtlety of speech. "I never'll speak to you again;
good-by."

Dot kept swinging her foot. "Good-by," she said in her sweet,
soft-breathing voice.

He walked away slowly, but his heart was hot with rage and wounded
pride, and every time he thought of the tone in which she said
"Good-by," his flesh quivered. He was seventeen, and considered himself
a man; she was eighteen, and thought him only a boy. She had never
listened to him, that he now understood. Maud had been right. Dot had
only pretended, and now for some reason she ceased to pretend.

There was just one comfort in all this: it made it easier for him to go
to the sunset country, and his wounded heart healed a little at the
thought of riding a horse behind a roaring herd of buffaloes.

CHAPTER III

THE YOUNG EAGLE STRIKES

A farming village like Rock River is one of the quietest, most humdrum
communities in the world till some sudden upheaval of primitive passion
reveals the tiger, the ram, and the wolf which decent and orderly
procedure has hidden. Cases of murder arise from the dead level of
everyday village routine like volcanic mountain peaks in the midst of a
flowering plain.

The citizens of Rock River were amazed and horrified one Monday morning
to learn that Dot Burland had eloped with the clerk in the principal
bank in the town, a married man and the leader of the choir in the First
Church. Some of the people when they heard of it, said: "I do not
believe it," and when they were convinced, the tears came to their eyes.
"She was such a pretty girl, and think of Mrs. Willard--and then
Sam--who would have supposed Sam Wi