nd is likely to give Ed trouble. He never'll give Bettie up without a
fight. Look out he don't jump onto _your_ neck."

"No danger o' that," said Milton coolly.

The Yohe boys were strangers in the neighborhood. They had come in with
the wave of harvest help from the South and had stayed on into the
winter, making few friends and a large number of enemies among the young
men of "the crick." Everybody admitted that they had metal in them, for
they instantly paid court to the prettiest girls in the neighborhood,
without regard to any prior claims.

And the girls were attracted by these Missourians, their air of
mysterious wickedness and their muscular swagger, precisely as a flock
of barnyard fowl are interested in the strange bird thrust among them.

But the Southerners had muscles like wild-cats, and their feats of broil
and battle commanded a certain respectful consideration. In fact, most
of the young men of the district were afraid of the red-faced, bold-eyed
strangers, one of the few exceptions being Milton, and another Shephard
Watson, his friend and room-mate at the Rock River Seminary. Neither of
these boys being at all athletic, it was rather curious that Bill and
Joe Yohe should treat them with so much consideration.

Bill was standing before the huge cannon stove, talking with Bettie,
when Milton and Shephard returned to the school-house. The man's hard,
black eyes were filled with a baleful fire, and his wolfish teeth shone
through his long red mustache. It made Milton mutter under his breath
to see how innocently Bettie laughed with him. She never dreamed and
could not have comprehended the vileness of the man's whole life and
thought. No lizard reveled in the mud more hideously than he. His
conversation reeked with obscenity. His tongue dropped poison each
moment when among his own sex, and his eye blazed it forth when in the
presence of women.

"Hello, Bill," said Milton, with easy indifference. "How goes it?"

"Oh, 'bout so-so. You rather got ahead o' me t'night, didn't yeh?"

"Well, rather. The man that gets ahead o' me has got t' drive a good
team, eh?" He looked at Bettie.

"I'd like to try it," said Bill.

"Well, let's go across the road," said Milton to Bettie, anxious to get
her out of the way of Bill.

They had to run the gauntlet of the whooping boys outside, but Bettie
proved too fleet of foot for them all.

When they entered the Dudley house opposite, her cheeks were hot with
color