ey
lifted her bodily from the porch. They handled her as if she had been a
half-empty sack of corn. One holding each hand and foot they packed her,
with dress disarranged and half torn off, down the path to the lane and
down the lane to the road. There they stood upright and pushed her off
her property.

Through half-blind eyes Helen saw them guarding the gateway, ready to
prevent her entrance. She staggered down the road to the village.
It seemed she made her way through a red dimness--that there was a
congestion in her brain--that the distance to Mrs. Cass's cottage was
insurmountable. But she got there, to stagger up the path, to hear the
old woman's cry. Dizzy, faint, sick, with a blackness enveloping all she
looked at, Helen felt herself led into the sitting-room and placed in
the big chair.

Presently sight and clearness of mind returned to her. She saw Roy,
white as a sheet, questioning her with terrible eyes. The old woman
hung murmuring over her, trying to comfort her as well as fasten the
disordered dress.

"Four greasers--packed me down--the hill--threw me off my ranch--into
the road!" panted Helen.

She seemed to tell this also to her own consciousness and to realize the
mighty wave of danger that shook her whole body.

"If I'd known--I would have killed them!"

She exclaimed that, full-voiced and hard, with dry, hot eyes on her
friends. Roy reached out to take her hand, speaking huskily. Helen
did not distinguish what he said. The frightened old woman knelt, with
unsteady fingers fumbling over the rents in Helen's dress. The moment
came when Helen's quivering began to subside, when her blood quieted
to let her reason sway, when she began to do battle with her rage, and
slowly to take fearful stock of this consuming peril that had been a
sleeping tigress in her veins.

"Oh, Miss Helen, you looked so turrible, I made sure you was hurted,"
the old woman was saying.

Helen gazed strangely at her bruised wrists, at the one stocking that
hung down over her shoe-top, at the rent which had bared her shoulder to
the profane gaze of those grinning, beady-eyed Mexicans.

"My body's--not hurt," she whispered.

Roy had lost some of his whiteness, and where his eyes had been fierce
they were now kind.

"Wal, Miss Nell, it's lucky no harm's done.... Now if you'll only see
this whole deal clear!... Not let it spoil your sweet way of lookin' an'
hopin'! If you can only see what's raw in this West--an' love it