whose winter-starved
branches formed a breakwater in the ice cold flood of the stream.

Jessie's pretty eyes were gazing up into the man's face. A quick look
of alarm had replaced, for the moment, the shadow of grief which had so
recently settled in them. Her plain cloth skirt had only utility to
recommend it. Her shirt-waist was serviceable in seasons as uncertain
as the present. The loose buckskin coat, which reached to her knees,
and had been fashioned and beaded by the Mission squaws, had
picturesqueness. But she gained nothing from these things as a setting
for her beauty.

But for Kars, at least, her beauty was undeniable. Her soft crown of
chestnut hair, hatless, at the mercy of the mood of the breeze, to him
seemed like a ruddy halo crowning a face of a childlike purity. Her
gentle gray eyes were to him unfathomable wells of innocence, while her
lips had all the ripeness of a delicious womanhood.

"You were scared that day we pulled into the Fort," he had said, in his
abrupt way.

He had been talking of his going on the morrow. And the change of
subject had come something startlingly to the girl.

"Yes," she admitted, almost before she was aware of it.

"That's how I guessed," he said. "I reached the office on the dead
jump--after I saw. Why? Murray had you scared. How?"

There was no escape from the man's searching gaze. Jessie felt he was
probing irresistibly secrets she vainly sought to keep hidden.
Subterfuge was useless under that regard.

"Murray asked me to marry him. He--asked me just then. I--wish he
hadn't."

"Why?" The inexorable pressure was maintained.

Jessie tried to avoid his eyes. She sought the aid of the bubbling
waters, racing and churning amongst the branches of the fallen tree.
She would have resented such catechism even in her mother. But she was
powerless to deny this man.

"Why?" she echoed at last. Suddenly she raised her eyes to his again.
They were frankly yielding. "Guess I'd rather have Murray guiding a
commercial proposition than hand me out the schedule of life."

"You don't like him, and you're scared of him. I wonder why."

The girl sat up. She flung back her head, and her outspread hands
supported her, resting on the tree-trunk on either side of her.

"Say, why do you talk that way?" she protested. "Is it always your way
to drive folks? I thought that was just Murray's way. Not yours. But
you're right, anyway. I'm scared of Murray wh