ew it had nothing to do with
his absent leg. A hundred yards ahead of them a boy and a girl emerged
from a ravine--young King Camp and Polly Sizemore--and plainly they were
quarrelling. The girl's head was high with indignation; the boy's was
low with anger, and now and then he would viciously dig the toe of his
boot in the sand as he strode along. Pleasant grinned.

"I won't holler to 'em," he said; "I reckon they'd ruther be alone."

"Pleasant," said Miss Mary, "you drink moonshine, don't you?"

"Yes'm."

"You sometimes _make_ it, don't you?"

"I've been s'picioned."

"You were turned out of church once, weren't you, for shooting up
a meeting?"

"Yes," was the indignant defense, "but I proved to 'em that I was
drunk, an' they tuk me back." The girl had to laugh.

"And yet you think dancing wrong?"

"Yes'm."

The girl gave it up--so perfunctory and final was is reply. Indeed, he
seemed to have lost interest. Twice he had looked back, and now he turned
again. She saw the fulfilment of some prophecy in his face as he grunted
and frowned.

"Thar comes Ham Cage," he said. Turning, the girl saw an awkward youth
stepping into the road from the same ravine whence Polly and young King
had come, but she did not, as did Pleasant, see Ham shifting a revolver
from his hip to an inside pocket.

"Those two boys worry the life out of me," she said, and again Pleasant
grunted. They were the two biggest boys in the school, and in running,
jumping, lifting weights, shooting at marks, and even in working--in
everything, indeed, except in books--they were tireless rivals. And now
they were bitter contestants for the favor of Polly Sizemore--a fact that
Pleasant knew better than the Mission girl.

Flirts are rare in the hills. "If two boys meets at the same house,"
Pleasant once had told her, "they jes makes the gal say which one she
likes best, and t'other one gits!" But with the growth of the Mission
school had come a certain tolerance which Polly had used to the limit.
Indeed, St. Hilda had discovered a queer reason for a sudden quickening
of interest on Polly's part in her studies. Polly had to have the letters
she got read for her, and the letters she sent written for her, and thus
St. Hilda found that at least three young men, who had gone into the army
and had learned to write, thought--each of them--that he was first in her
heart. Polly now wanted to learn to read and write so that she could keep
such secrets to he