of you, and
have you all for myself, you understand. What do you say?"

Hilma, standing up before him, retied a knot in her handkerchief bundle
with elaborate precaution, blinking at it through her tears.

"What do you say, Miss Hilma?" Annixter repeated. "How about that? What
do you say?"

Just above a whisper, Hilma murmured:

"I--I don't know."

"Don't know what? Don't you think we could hit it off together?"

"I don't know."

"I know we could, Hilma. I don't mean to scare you. What are you crying
for?" "I don't know."

Annixter got up, cast away his cigar, and dropping the buckskin's
bridle, came and stood beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. Hilma
did not move, and he felt her trembling. She still plucked at the knot
of the handkerchief. "I can't do without you, little girl," Annixter
continued, "and I want you. I want you bad. I don't get much fun out of
life ever. It, sure, isn't my nature, I guess. I'm a hard man. Everybody
is trying to down me, and now I'm up against the Railroad. I'm fighting
'em all, Hilma, night and day, lock, stock, and barrel, and I'm fighting
now for my home, my land, everything I have in the world. If I win out,
I want somebody to be glad with me. If I don't--I want somebody to be
sorry for me, sorry with me,--and that somebody is you. I am dog-tired
of going it alone. I want some one to back me up. I want to feel you
alongside of me, to give me a touch of the shoulder now and then. I'm
tired of fighting for THINGS--land, property, money. I want to fight for
some PERSON--somebody beside myself. Understand? want to feel that it
isn't all selfishness--that there are other interests than mine in the
game--that there's some one dependent on me, and that's thinking of me
as I'm thinking of them--some one I can come home to at night and put my
arm around--like this, and have her put her two arms around me--like--"
He paused a second, and once again, as it had been in that moment
of imminent peril, when he stood with his arm around her, their eyes
met,--"put her two arms around me," prompted Annixter, half smiling,
"like--like what, Hilma?"

"I don't know."

"Like what, Hilma?" he insisted.

"Like--like this?" she questioned. With a movement of infinite
tenderness and affection she slid her arms around his neck, still crying
a little.

The sensation of her warm body in his embrace, the feeling of her
smooth, round arm, through the thinness of her sleeve, pressing against