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Something made Cass ask if her father and mother objected to her boyish tastes. The reply was characteristic if not satisfactory,–

“Object? I’d like to see them do it.”

The direction of the road had changed. The fickle moon now abandoned Miss Porter and sought out Cass on the front seat. It caressed the young fellow’s silky moustache and long eyelashes, and took some of the sunburn from his cheek.

“What’s the matter with your neck?” said the girl, suddenly.

Cass looked down, blushing to find that the collar of his smart “duck” sailor shirt was torn open. But something more than his white, soft, girlish skin was exposed; the shirt front was dyed quite red with blood from a slight cut on the shoulder. He remembered to have felt a scratch while struggling with Hornsby.

The girl’s soft eyes sparkled. “Let ME,” she said, vivaciously. “Do! I’m good at wounds. Come over here. No–stay there. I’ll come over to you.”

She did, bestriding the back of the middle seat and dropping at his side. The magnetic fingers again touched his; he felt her warm breath on his neck as she bent toward him.

“It’s nothing,” he said, hastily, more agitated by the treatment than the wound.

“Give me your flask,” she responded, without heeding. A stinging sensation as she bathed the edges of the cut with the spirit brought him back to common sense again. “There,” she said, skillfully extemporizing a bandage from her handkerchief and a compress from his cravat. “Now, button your coat over your chest, so, and don’t take cold.” She insisted upon buttoning it for him; greater even than the feminine delight in a man’s strength is the ministration to his weakness. Yet, when this was finished, she drew a little away from him in some embarrassment–an embarrassment she wondered at, as his skin was finer, his touch gentler, his clothes cleaner, and–not to put too fine a point upon it–he exhaled an atmosphere much sweeter than belonged to most of the men her boyish habits had brought her in contact with–not excepting her own father. Later she even exempted her mother from the possession of this divine effluence. After a moment she asked, suddenly, “What are you going to do with Hornsby?”

Cass had not thought of him. His short-lived rage was past with the occasion that provoked it. Without any fear of his adversary he would have been content and quite willing to meet him no more. He only said, “That will depend upon him.”

“Oh, you won’t hear from him again,” said she, confidently, “but you really ought to get up a little more muscle. You’ve no more than a girl.” She stopped, a little confused.

“What shall I do with your handkerchief?” asked the uneasy Cass, anxious to change the subject.

“Oh, keep it, if you want to, only don’t show it to everybody as you did that ring you found.” Seeing signs of distress in his face, she added: “Of course that was all nonsense. If you had cared so much for the ring you couldn’t have talked about it, or shown it. Could you?”

It relieved him to think that this might be true; he certainly had not looked at it in that light before.

“But did you really find it?” she asked, with sudden gravity. “Really, now?”

“Yes.”

“And there was no real May in the case?”

“Not that I know of,” laughed Cass, secretly pleased.

But Miss Porter, after eying him critically for a moment jumped up and climbed back again to her seat. “Perhaps you had better give me that handkerchief back.”

Cass began to unbutton his coat.

“No! no! Do you want to take your death of cold?” she screamed. And Cass, to avoid this direful possibility, rebuttoned his coat again over the handkerchief and a peculiarly pleasing sensation.

Very little now was said until the rattling, bounding descent of the coach denoted the approach to Red Chief. The straggling main street disclosed itself, light by light. In the flash of glittering windows and the sound of eager voices Miss Porter descended, without waiting for Cass’s proffered assistance, and anticipated Mountain Charley’s descent from the box. A few undistinguishable words passed between them.