e thought, would be pleasant if only she would come down
off her pedestal and be humanly sociable.

When he wrote a story about a fellow being laid up in the same house
with a girl--a girl with big, blue-gray eyes and ripply brown hair--he
would have the girl treat the fellow at least decently. She would read
poetry to him and bring him flowers, and do ever so many nice things
that would make him hate to get well. He decided that he would write
just that kind of story; he would idealize it, of course, and have the
fellow in love with the girl; you have to, in stories. In real life it
doesn't necessarily follow that, because a fellow admires a girl's hair
and eyes, and wants to be on friendly terms, he is in love with her.
For example, he emphatically was not in love with Mona Stevens. He only
wanted her to be decently civil and to stop holding a foolish grudge
against him for not standing up and letting himself be shot full of
holes because she commanded it.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Stevens would sit beside him and knit things
and talk to him in a pleasantly garrulous fashion, and he would lie and
listen to her--and to Mona, singing somewhere. Mona sang very well, he
thought; he wondered if she had ever had any training. Also, he wished
he dared ask her not to sing that song about "She's only a bird in a
gilded cage." It brought back too vividly the nights when he and Bob
stood guard under the quiet stars.

And then one day he hobbled out into the dining-room and ate dinner with
the family. Since he sat opposite Mona she was obliged to look at
him occasionally, whether she would or no. Thurston had a strain of
obstinacy in his nature, and when he decided that Mona should not only
look at him, but should talk to him as well, he set himself diligently
to attain that end. He was not the man to sit down supinely and let a
girl calmly ignore him; so Mona presently found herself talking to him
with some degree of cordiality; and what is more to the point, listening
to him when he talked. It is probable that Thurston never had tried so
hard in his life to win a girl's attention.

It was while he was still hobbling with a cane and taxing his
imagination daily to invent excuses for remaining, that Lauman, the
sheriff, rode up to the door with a deputy and asked shelter for
themselves and the two Wagners, who glowered sullenly down from their
weary horses. When they had been safely disposed in Thurston's bedroom,
with one of