title="10"/> imperative in the girl’s voice. “Why, didn’t I tell you, honey—Jake Houck?”

“I don’t want to know his name. I want to know who he is—all about him.”

Tolliver drove home a rivet before he answered. “Jake’s a cowman.” His voice was apologetic. “I seen you didn’t like him. He’s biggity, Jake is.”

“He’s the most hateful man I ever saw,” she burst out.

Pete lifted thin, straw-colored eyebrows in questioning, but June had no intention of telling what had taken place. She would fight her own battles.

“Well, he’s a sure enough toughfoot,” admitted the rancher.

“When did you know him?”

“We was ridin’ together, a right long time ago.”

“Where?”

“Up around Rawlins—thataway.”

“He said he knew you in Brown’s Park.”

The man flashed a quick, uncertain look at his daughter. It appeared to ask how much Houck had told. “I might ’a’ knowed him there too. Come to think of it, I did. Punchers drift around a heap. Say, how about dinner? You got it started? I’m gettin’ powerful hungry.”

June knew the subject was closed. She might have pushed deeper into her father’s reticence, but some instinct shrank from what she might uncover. There could be only pain in learning the secret he so carefully hid.

There had been no discussion of it between them, nor had it been necessary to have any. It was tacitly understood that they would have little traffic with their neighbors, that only at rare intervals would Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl’s thoughts and emotions were the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of her father’s past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or callously indifferent. Upon June it had the former effect.

The sense of inferiority was branded upon her. She had seen girls giggling at the shapeless sacks she had stitched together for clothes with which to dress herself. She was uncouth, awkward, a thin black thing ugly as sin. It had never dawned on her that she possessed rare potentialities of beauty, that there was coming a time when she would bloom gloriously as a cactus in a sand waste.

After dinner June went down to the creek and followed a path along its edge. She started up a buck lying in the grass and watched it go crashing through the brush. It was a big-game country. The settlers lived largely on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was a crack shot.

But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod lay in the path. On a flat rock near it a boy was stretched, face up, looking into the blue, unflecked sky.

He was a red-headed, stringy boy between eighteen and nineteen years old. His hands were laced back of the head, but he waggled a foot by way of greeting.

“’Lo, June,” he called.

“What you doin’?” she demanded.

“Oh, jes’ watchin’ the grass grow.”

She sat down beside him, drawing up her feet beneath the skirt and gathering the knees between laced fingers. Moodily, she looked down at the water swirling round the rocks.

Bob Dillon said nothing. He had a capacity for silence that was not uncompanionable. They could sit by the hour, these two, quite content, without exchanging a dozen sentences. The odd thing about it was that they were not old friends. Three weeks ago they had met for the first time. He was flunkeying for a telephone outfit building a line to Bear Cat.

“A man stayed up to the house last night,” she said at last.

He leaned his head on a hand, turning toward her. The light blue eyes in the freckled face rested on those of the girl.

Presently she added, with a flare of surging anger, “I hate him.”

“Why?”

The blood burned beneath the tan of the brown cheeks. “’Cause.”

“Shucks! That don’t do any good. It don’t buy you anything.”

She swung upon him abruptly. “Don’t you hate the men at the camp when they knock you around?”

“What’d be the use? I duck outa the way next time.”

Two savage little demons glared at him out of her dark eyes. “Ain’t you got any sand in yore craw, Bob Dillon? Do you aim to let folks run on you all yore life? I’d fight ’em if ’t was the last thing I ever did.”

“Different here. I’d get my block knocked off about twice a week. You don’t see me in any scraps where I ain’t got a look-in. I’d rather let ’em boot me a few,” he said philosophically.

She frowned at him, in a kind of puzzled wonderment. “You’re right queer. If I was a man—”

The sentence died out. She was not a man. The limitations of sex encompassed her. In Jake Houck’s arms she had been no more than an infant. He would crush her resistance—no matter whether it was physical or mental—and fling out at her the cruel jeering laughter of one who could win without even exerting his strength. She would never marry him—never, never in the world. But—

A chill dread drenched her heart.

Young Dillon was sensitive to impressions. His eyes, fixed on the girl’s face, read something of her fears.

“This man—who is he?” he asked.

“Jake Houck. I never saw him till last night. My father knew him when—when he was young.”

“What’s the matter with this Houck? Why don’t you like him?”

“If you’d see him—how he looks at me.” She flashed to anger. “As if I was something he owned and meant to tame.”

“Oh, well, you know the old sayin’, a cat may look at a king. He can’t harm you.”

“Can’t he? How do you know he can’t?” she challenged.

“How can he, come to that?”

“I don’t say he can.” Looked at in cold blood, through the eyes of another, the near-panic that had seized her a few hours earlier appeared ridiculous. “But I don’t have to like him, do I? He acted—hateful—if you want to know.”

“How d’you mean—hateful?”

A wave of color swept through her cheeks to the brown throat. How could she tell him that there was something in the man’s look that had disrobed her, something in his ribald laugh that had made her feel unclean? Or that the fellow had brushed aside the pride and dignity that fenced her and ravished kisses from her lips while he mocked? She could not have put her feeling into words if she had tried, and she had no intention of trying.

“Mean,” she said. “A low-down, mean bully.”

The freckled boy watched her with a curious interest. She made no more sex appeal to him than he did to her, and that was none at all. The first thing that had moved him in the child was the friendlessness back of her spitfire offense. She knew no women, no other girls. The conditions of life kept her aloof from the ones she met casually once or twice a year. She suspected their laughter, their whispers about the wild girl on Piceance Creek. The pride with which she ignored them was stimulated by her sense of inferiority. June had read books. She felt the clothes she made were hideous, the conditions of her existence squalid; and back of these externals was the shame she knew because they must hide themselves from the world on account of the secret.

Bob did not know all that, but he guessed