For an instant she could scarcely believe
that she had left the ridge with her husband's savage outcry in her
ears, and in her eyes the swift vision of his furious cavalcade. The
boundary meadow was hidden by the soft lines of graceful willows in
whose dim recesses the figures of the passionate horsemen seemed to have
melted forever. There was nothing now to interrupt the long vista of
peaceful beauty that stretched before her through this lonely hollow to
the distant sleeping hills. The bursting barn in the foreground, heaped
with grain that fringed its eaves and bristled from its windows and
doors until its unlovely bulk was hidden in trailing feathery outlines;
the gentle flutter of wings and soothing twitter of swallows and jays
around its open rafters, and the drifting shadows of a few circling
crows above it; the drowsy song of bees on the wild mustard that half
hid its walls with yellow bloom; the sound of faintly-trickling water in
one of those old Indian-haunted springs that had given its name to the
locality; all these for an instant touched the senses of this hard,
fierce woman as she had not been touched since she was a girl. For one
brief moment the joys of peace and that matured repose that never had
been hers flashed upon her; but with it came the savage consciousness
that even now it was being wrested away, and the thought fired her blood
again. She listened eagerly for a second in the direction of the meadow;
there was no report of fire-arms--there was yet time to prepare the barn
for defence. She ran to the front of the building and seized the latch
of the half-closed door. A little feminine cry that was half a laugh
came from within, with the rapid rustle of a skirt and as the door
swung open a light figure vanished through the rear window. The slanting
sunlight falling in the shadowed interior disclosed only the single
erect figure of the school-master John Ford.

The first confusion and embarrassment of an interrupted rendezvous that
had colored Ford's cheeks, gave way to a look of alarm as he caught
sight of the bleeding face and dishevelled figure of Mrs. McKinstry. She
saw it. To her distorted fancy it seemed only a proof of deeper guilt.
Without a word she closed the heavy door behind her and swung the huge
cross-bar unaided to its place. She then turned and confronted him,
wiping the dust from her face and arms with her torn and dangling
sun-bonnet in a way that recalled her attitude on the fir