her caller to proceed or to leave
her.

"You must excuse me if I seem to be interfering in your affairs. You are
a stranger here except to York and that man Ponk--" Stella began,
thrusting her hooks more viciously into her catch.

"Oh, you didn't interfere," Jerry interrupted her indifferently, and
then paused.

Mrs. Bahrr caught her breath. The girl was sinfully pretty and
attractive, her beauty and grace in themselves alone railing out at the
older woman's ugly spirit of envy. And she should be tender, with
feeling to be lacerated for these gifts of nature. Instead, she was firm
and hard, with no vulnerable spot for a poisoned shaft.

"I'm sure you had a right to go into a man's private office. It's
everybody's right, of course," she began, with that faint sneering tone
of hers that carried a threat of what might follow.

"Yes, but a little discourteous in me to drive you out. That was Mr.
Macpherson's fault, not mine," Jerry broke in, easily.

"Maybe that's her grievance. I'll be decent about it," the girl was
thinking.

"I'm awfully bored right now." The wind shifted quickly. "I run up to
see Laury a minute. Just slipped in the side-stoop way to save troublin'
you an' York out here. I knowed Laury wouldn't be here, an', would you
believe it? I clar forgot they was gone out, an' I seen you all leavin',
too--I mean them, of course."

The threatening tone could not be reproduced. It carried, however, a
most uncomfortable force like a cruel undertow beneath the seemingly
safe crest of a wave.

"It's a joke on me bein' so stupid, but you won't give me away to 'em,
will you?"

"I'm awfully bored, too," Jerry thought.

"You say you won't tell 'em at all that I come?" Mrs. Bahrr insisted.

"Not if you say so," Jerry replied, with a smile.

"I'm an awfully good friend of Laury's. She's a poor cripple, dependent
on her brother for everything, an' if he marries, as he's bound to do,
I'd hate to see her turned out of here. This house is just Laury
through and through. Don't you think so? 'Course, though, if York
marries again--" Stellar Bahrr stopped meditatively. "All the women in
the Sage Brush Valley's just crazy about York. He's some flirt, but
everybody thought he'd settled his mind once sure. But I guess he flared
up again, from what they say. She's too fur away from town a'most. Them
that's furtherest away don't have a chance like them that's nearest him.
But it may be all just gossip. There was a lot o