Again Macdonald's hand went to his hat in respectful salute, and again
he saw that flash of anger spread in the young woman's cheeks. Her
fury blazed in her eyes as she looked at him a moment, and a dull
color mounted in his own face as he beheld her foolish and unjustified
pride.

Macdonald would have passed her then, but she spurred her horse upon
him with sudden-breaking temper, forcing him to spring back quickly to
the roadside to escape being trampled. Before he could collect himself
in his astonishment, she struck him a whistling blow with her
long-thonged quirt across the face.

"You dog!" she said, her clenched little white teeth showing in her
parted lips.

Macdonald caught the bridle and pushed her horse back to its haunches,
and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp
quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an
ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the
warrant of his inferiority.

The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of
the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut
until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron
had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the
foolish display of Nola's temper was done he rocked in his saddle and
shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.

He patted his daughter on the shoulder, like a hunter rewarding a dog.
Macdonald walked away from them, the only humiliation that he felt for
the incident being that which he suffered for her sake.

It was not so much that a woman had debased herself to the level of a
savage, although that hurt him, too, but that her blows had been the
expression of the contempt in which the lords of that country held him
and his kind. Bullets did not matter so much, for a man could give
them back as hot as they came. But there was no answer, as he could
see it in that depressing hour, for such a feudal assertion of
superiority as this.

It was to the work of breaking the hold of this hard-handed
aristocracy which had risen from the grass roots in the day of its
arrogant prosperity--a prosperity founded on usurpation of the rights
of the weak, and upheld by murder--that he had set his soul. The need
of hastening the reformation never had seemed greater to him than on
that day, or more hopeless, he admitted in his heart.

For hour by hour the work ahead of him appeared t