"No, no!" she protested, remembering her own scorn in the moments of his remorseful weakness.
"But I've got over all that. After the sheriff had been there, after my talk with him and those sheepmen, I felt all right. I was shaken at first—nearly shaken loose from my grip. There's more at stake for me there than my homestead now, Edith: there's every principle of justice and manhood. I'd be a coward to quit it now."
"I urged you on," she said repentantly. "I was always blowin' about a man that would come along some day with nerve enough to open that country. I was proud of you when you went in, but I didn't think you'd ever have to kill anybody, I didn't think they'd crowd you that far. Now they'll kill you to even it up. They're not the kind to let it drop now."
"I'm not worrying about that so much, Edith, as I am about my hay," he said, trying to lighten it with alaugh. "I've got fifty tons or more to cut yet. I've been hoping all day they'd drop it, so I could take the team in again and get a mower. I could make some money out of that hay next winter."
"I was going over to see you," she said, with a manner of dull insistence, as if her long anxiety had stunned her.
"It's all right, and it's going to keep on being all right," he assured her. He took her hand, chafing it, consoling it by his caress, as one comforts a child for a hurt.
There never had been any eye-making between these two, no sentimental passages, no courting, in the sense that that homely word is generally understood. Raw-
