og--DID she remember him? I checked the sister here with a
glance, for Marston looked uncomfortable and the Blight saw me do it,
and on the point of saying something she checked herself, and her face,
I thought, paled a little.

That night I learned why--when she came in from the porch after Marston
was gone. I saw she had wormed enough of the story out of him to worry
her, for her face this time was distinctly pale. I would tell her no
more than she knew, however, and then she said she was sure she had seen
the Wild Dog herself that afternoon, sitting on his horse in the bushes
near a station in Wildcat Valley. She was sure that he saw her, and his
face had frightened her. I knew her fright was for Marston and not for
herself, so I laughed at her fears. She was mistaken--Wild Dog was an
outlaw now and he would not dare appear at the Gap, and there was no
chance that he could harm her or Marston. And yet I was uneasy.

It must have been a happy ten days for those two young people. Every
afternoon Marston would come in from the mines and they would go off
horseback together, over ground that I well knew--for I had been all
over it myself--up through the gray-peaked rhododendron-bordered Gap
with the swirling water below them and the gray rock high above where
another such foolish lover lost his life, climbing to get a flower for
his sweetheart, or down the winding dirt road into Lee, or up through
the beech woods behind Imboden Hill, or climbing the spur of Morris's
Farm to watch the sunset over the majestic Big Black Mountains, where
the Wild Dog lived, and back through the fragrant, cool, moonlit woods.
He was doing his best, Marston was, and he was having trouble--as every
man should. And that trouble I knew even better than he, for I had once
known a Southern girl who was so tender of heart that she could refuse
no man who really loved her she accepted him and sent him to her father,
who did all of her refusing for her. And I knew no man would know that
he had won the Blight until he had her at the altar and the priestly
hand of benediction was above her head.

Of such kind was the Blight. Every night when they came in I could read
the story of the day, always in his face and sometimes in hers; and
it was a series of ups and downs that must have wrung the boy's heart
bloodless. Still I was in good hope for him, until the crisis came
on the night before the Fourth. The quarrel was as plain as though
typewritten on t