ut shoulders and made, among them, a
comfortable bit of rolling ground, deep soiled and fertile. Here, so
Kate Barry assured him, the wild flowers came even earlier than they did
in the valley so far below them, and to be sure when Vic first walked
from the house he found the meadow aflame with color except for the
space covered by the truck-garden and the corral. In that enclosure he
found Grey Molly fenced away from the black with several other horses of
commoner blood, for the stallion, he learned, recognized no fraternity
of horseflesh, but killed what he could reach. Grey Molly was quite
recovered from her long run, and she greeted him in her familiar way,
with ears flattened viciously.

He might have stayed on here quite happily for any space of time, but
more and more Vic felt that he was an intruder; he sensed it, rather
than received a hint of word or eye. In the first place the three were
complete in themselves, a triangle of happiness without need of another
member for variety or interest. It was plain at a glance that the girl
was whole-heartedly happy, and whatever incongruity lay between her and
these rough mountains he began to understand that her love for Barry and
the child made ample amends. As for the other two, he always thought
of them in the same instant, for if the child had her eyes and her hair
from her mother, she had her nature from the man. They were together
constantly, on walks up the mountain, when she rode Black Bart up the
steep places: on dips into the valley, when he carried her before him on
the stallion. She had the same soft voice, the same quick, furtive
ways, the same soundless laughter, at times; and when Barry sat in the
evening, as he often did for hours, staring at empty air, she would
climb on his knee, place his unresisting arm around her, and she looking
up into his face, sharing his silences. Sometimes Vic wondered if the
young mother were not troubled, made a little jealous by this perfect
companionship, but he never found a trace of it. It was she, finally,
who made him determine to leave as soon as his shoulder muscles moved
with perfect freedom, for as the days slipped past he felt that she grew
more and more uneasy, and her eyes had a way of going from him to her
husband as though she believed their guest a constant danger to Barry.
Indeed, to some small extent he was a danger, for the law might deal
hardly with a man who took a fugitive out of the very grip of its han