rd, with a sweet-voiced,
bright-eyed little schoolma'am who can laugh like that.

"I don't want to have you think I may be a bold, bad robber-man," he
said, when they got going again. "My name's Rowdy Vaughan--for which I
beg your pardon. Mother named me Rowland, never knowing I'd get out here
and have her nice, pretty name mutilated that way. I won't say that my
behavior never suggested the change, though. I'm from the Horseshoe
Bar, over the line, and if I have my way, I'll be a Cross L man before
another day." Then he waited expectantly.

"For fear you may think I'm a--a robber-woman," she answered him
solemnly--he felt sure her eyes twinkled, if only he could have seen
them--"I'm Jessie Conroy. And if you're from over the line, maybe you
know my brother Harry. He was over there a year or two."

Rowdy hunched his shoulders--presumably at the wind. Harry Conroy's
sister, was she? And he swore. "I may have met him," he parried, in a
tone you'd never notice as being painstakingly careless. "I think I did,
come to think of it."

Miss Conroy seemed displeased, and presently the cause was forthcoming.
"If you'd ever met him," she said, "you'd hardly forget him."
(Rowdy mentally agreed profanely.) "He's the best rider in the whole
country--and the handsomest. He--he's splendid! And he's the only
brother I've got. It's a pity you never got acquainted with him."

"Yes," lied Rowdy, and thought a good deal in a very short time. Harry
Conroy's sister! Well, she wasn't to blame for that, of course; nor for
thinking her brother a white man. "I remember I did see him ride once,"
he observed. "He was a whirlwind, all right--and he sure was handsome,
too."

Miss Conroy turned her face toward him and smiled her pleasure, and
Rowdy hovered between heaven and--another place. He was glad she
smiled, and he was afraid of what that subject might discover for his
straightforward tongue in the way of pitfalls. It would not be nice to
let her know what he really thought of her brother.

"This looks to me like a lane," he said diplomatically. "We must be
getting somewhere; don't you recognize any landmarks?"

Miss Conroy leaned forward and peered through the clouds of snow dust.
Already the night was creeping down upon the land, stealthily turning
the blank white of the blizzard into as blank a gray--which was as near
darkness as it could get, because of the snow which fell and fell,
and yet seemed never to find an abiding-place, but