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“Here! Here!”

The drunken youth wheeled and his right hand shot toward his hip pocket. The engineer was belted with a pistol, but with one lightning movement and an incredibly long reach, his right fist caught the fellow’s jaw so that he pitched backward and collapsed like an empty bag. Then the engineer caught sight of the Blight’s bewildered face, flushed, gripped his hands in front of him and simply stared. At last he saw me:

“Oh,” he said, “how do you do?” and he turned to his prisoner, but the panting sergeant and another policeman–also a volunteer–were already lifting him to his feet. I introduced the boy and the Blight then, and for the first time in my life I saw the Blight–shaken. Round-eyed, she merely gazed at him.

“That was pretty well done,” I said.

“Oh, he was drunk and I knew he would be slow.” Now something curious happened. The dazed prisoner was on his feet, and his captors were starting with him to the calaboose when he seemed suddenly to come to his senses.

“Jes wait a minute, will ye?” he said quietly, and his captors, thinking perhaps that he wanted to say something to me, stopped. The mountain youth turned a strangely sobered face and fixed his blue eyes on the engineer as though he were searing every feature of that imperturbable young man in his brain forever. It was not a bad face, but the avenging hatred in it was fearful. Then he, too, saw the Blight, his face calmed magically and he, too, stared at her, and turned away with an oath checked at his lips. We went on–the Blight thrilled, for she had heard much of our volunteer force at the Gap and had seen something already. Presently I looked back. Prisoner and captors were climbing the little hill toward the calaboose and the mountain boy just then turned his head and I could swear that his eyes sought not the engineer, whom we left at the corner, but, like the engineer, he was looking at the Blight. Whereat I did not wonder–particularly as to the engineer. He had been in the mountains for a long time and I knew what this vision from home meant to him. He turned up at the house quite early that night.

“I’m not on duty until eleven,” he said hesitantly, “and I thought I’d—-“

“Come right in.”

I asked him a few questions about business and then I left him and the Blight alone. When I came back she had a Gatling gun of eager questions ranged on him and–happy withal–he was squirming no little. I followed him to the gate.

“Are you really going over into those God-forsaken mountains?” he asked.

“I thought I would.”

“And you are going to take HER?”

“And my sister.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon.” He strode away.

“Coming up by the mines?” he called back.

“Perhaps will you show us around?”

“I guess I will,” he said emphatically, and he went on to risk his neck on a ten-mile ride along a mountain road in the dark.

“I LIKE a man,” said the Blight. “I like a MAN.”

Of course the Blight must see everything, so she insisted on going to the police court next morning for the trial of the mountain boy. The boy was in the witness chair when we got there, and the Hon. Samuel Budd was his counsel. He had volunteered to defend the prisoner, I was soon told, and then I understood. The November election was not far off and the Hon. Samuel Budd was candidate for legislature. More even, the boy’s father was a warm supporter of Mr. Budd and the boy himself might perhaps render good service in the cause when the time came–as indeed he did. On one of the front chairs sat the young engineer and it was a question whether he or the prisoner saw the Blight’s black plumes first. The eyes of both flashed toward her simultaneously, the engineer colored perceptibly and the mountain boy stopped short in speech and his pallid face flushed with unmistakable shame. Then he went on: “He had liquered up,” he said, “and had got tight afore he knowed it and he didn’t mean no harm and had never been arrested afore in his whole life.”