was her old playmate! And she had
saved his life hundreds of times, at immense risks to herself; and he
had always been her devoted slave afterwards, and never failed to
appear at the precise moment when she was beset by Indians or robbers
or something, and in dire need. The blood he had shed in her behalf!
At that point Billy Louise startled herself and the others by suddenly
laughing out loud at the memory of one time when Ward Warren had killed
enough Indians to fill a deep washout so that he might carry her across
to the other side!

"Is there anything funny about Jase Meilke dying, Billy Louise?" her
mother asked her in a perfectly shocked tone.

"No--I was thinking of something else." She glanced at the man eyeing
her so distrustfully from across the table and gurgled again. It was
terribly silly, but she simply could not help seeing Ward Warren calmly
filling that washout with dead Indians so that he might carry her
across it in his arms. The more she tried to forget that, the funnier
it became. She ended by leaving the table and retiring precipitately
to her own tiny room in the lean-to where she buried her face as deep
as it would go in a puffy pillow of wild duck feathers.

He, poor devil, could not be expected to know just what had amused her
so; he did know that it somehow concerned himself, however. He took up
his position--mentally--behind the wall of aloofness which stood
between himself and an unfriendly world, and when Billy Louise came out
later to help with the dishes, he was sitting absorbed in a book.

Billy Louise got out her algebra and a slate and began to ponder the
problem of a much-handicapped goat's feeding-ground. Ward Warren read
and read and read and never looked up from the pages. Never in her
life had she seen a man read as he read; hungrily, as a starved man
eats; rapidly, his eyes traveling like a shuttle across the page; down,
down--flip a leaf quickly and let the shuttle-glance go on. Billy
Louise let her slate, with the goat problem unsolved, lie in her lap
while she watched him. When she finally became curious enough to
decipher the name of the book--she had three or four in that dull,
brown binding--and saw that he was reading _The Ring and the Book_, she
felt stunned. She read Browning just as she drank sage tea; it was
supposed to be good for her. Her English teacher had given her that
book. She never would have believed that any living human could read
it as