r right soon, but he can't see it. I reckon the
toot of an engine would scare him 'most to death."

"Don't get excited about that railroad, son," drawled the former
hard-rock driller, chewing his cud equably. "I rode a horse to death
fifteen years ago to beat the choo-choo train in here, an' I notice it
ain't arriv yet."

Bob left them to their argument. He was not just now in a mood for
badinage. He moved up the street past the scattered suburbs of the little
frontier town. Under the cool stars he wanted to think out what had just
taken place.

Had he fainted from sheer fright when the gun blazed at him? Or was
Blister's explanation a genuine one? He had read of men being thrown down
and knocked senseless by the atmospheric shock of shells exploding near
them in battle. But this would not come in that class. He had been
actually struck. The belt buckle had been driven against his flesh. Had
this hit him with force enough actually to drive the breath out of him?
Or had he thought himself wounded and collapsed because of the thought?

It made a great deal of difference to him which of these was true, more
than it did to the little world in which he moved. Some of the boys might
guy him good-naturedly, but nobody was likely to take the matter
seriously except himself. Bob had begun to learn that a man ought to be
his own most severe critic. He had set out to cure himself of cowardice.
He would not be easy in mind so long as he still suspected himself of
showing the white feather.

He leaned on a fence and looked across the silvery sage to a grove of
quaking asp beyond. How long he stood there, letting thoughts drift
through his mind, he did not know. A sound startled him, the faint swish
of something stirring. He turned.

Out of the night shadows a nymph seemed to be floating toward him. For a
moment he had a sense of unreality, that the flow and rhythm of her
movement were born of the imagination. But almost at once he knew that
this was June in the flesh.

The moonlight haloed the girl, lent her the touch of magic that
transformed her from a creature not too good for human nature's daily
food into an ethereal daughter of romance. Her eyes were dark pools of
loveliness in a white face.

"June!" he cried, excitement drumming in his blood.

Why had she come to find him? What impulse or purpose had brought her out
into the night in his wake? Desire of her, tender, poignant, absorbing,
pricked through him like an