om the thought. Then Cal Emmett
came up to ask her for a dance, and she went with him thankfully and
tried to forget the things she had heard.

Weary, after dancing with every woman but the one he wanted, and
finding himself beside Myrtle Forsyth with a frequency that puzzled
him, felt an unutterable disgust for the whole thing. After a waltz
quadrille, during which he seemed to get her out of his arms only to
find her swinging into them again, and smiling up at him in a way he
knew of old, he made desperately for the door; snatched up the first
gray hat he came to--which happened to belong to Chip--and went out
into the dewy darkness.

It was half an hour before he could draw the hostler of the Dry Lake
stable away from a crap game, and it was another half hour before he
succeeded in overcoming Glory's disinclination for a gallop over the
prairie alone.

But it was two hours before Miss Forsythe gave over watching furtively
the door, and it was daylight before Chip Emmett found a gray hat under
the water bench--a hat which he finally recognized as Weary's and so
appropriated to his own use.

PART FOUR

Weary clattered up to the school-house door to find it erupting divers
specimens of young America--by adoption, some of them. He greeted each
one cheerfully by name and waited upon his horse in the shade.

Close behind the last sun-bonnet came Miss Satterly, key in hand.
Evidently she had no intention of lingering, that night; Weary smiled
down upon her tentatively and made a hasty guess as to her state of
mind--a very important factor in view of what he had come to say.

"It's awful hot, Schoolma'am; if I were you I'd wait a while--till the
sun lets up a little."

To his unbounded surprise, Miss Satterly calmly sat down upon the
doorstep. Weary promptly slid out of the saddle and sat down beside
her, thankful that the step was not a wide one. "You've been
unmercifully hard to locate since the dance," he complained. "I like
to lost my job, chasing over this way, when I was supposed to be headed
another direction. I came by here last night at five minutes after
four, and you weren't in sight anywhere; was yesterday a holiday?"

"You probably didn't look in the window," said the schoolma'am. "I was
writing letters here till after five."

"With the door shut and locked?"

"The wind blew so," explained Miss Satterly, lamely. "And that lock--"

"First I knew of the wind blowing yesterday. It was