ringly.

"Oh, come on, Elinor; be a good Indian!"

"Don't do it, Miss Wream," Vincent Burgess pleaded.

Elinor looked from the one to the other, and the very magnetism of power
called her.

"I mean to try, anyhow," she declared. "Will you pick me up if I fall,
Victor?"

"Well, I wouldn't hardly go away and leave you to perish miserably," Vic
assured her, and they were off together.

The Wream men were slender, and all of them, except Lloyd Fenneben, the
stepbrother, wore nose glasses and drank hot water at breakfast, and ate
predigested foods, and talked of acids and carbons, and took prescribed
gestures for exercise. The joyousness of perfect health was in every
motion of this young man. His brown sweater showed a hard white throat.
He planted his feet firmly. And he leaped up the bluffside easily. If
Elinor slipped, the strength of his grip on her arm reassured her, until
climbing beside him became a joy.

The bluff was less surly than it appeared to be down in the Corral, and
the benediction of autumn was in the view from its crest. They sat
down on the stone ledge crowning it, and Elinor threw aside her jaunty
scarlet outing cap. The breezes played in her dark hair, and her cheeks
were pink from the exercise. Victor Burleigh looked at her with frank,
wide-open eyes.

"What's the matter? Is my hair a fright?" she murmured.

"A fright!" Burleigh flung off his cap and ran his fingers through his
own hair. "Not what I call a fright," he asserted in an even tone.

"What's that scar on your left arm? It looks like a little hole dug
out," Elinor declared.

Vic's brown sweater sleeve was pushed up to the elbow.

"It is a little hole I put in where I dug out the flesh with a pocket
knife," he replied, carelessly.

"Did you do that yourself?" Elinor cried. "What made you be so cruel?"

"I wasn't so cruel. 'I seen my duty and I done it noble,' as the essay
runs. I made that vacancy to get ahead of a rattlesnake that got me
there, a venomous big one with nine police calls on its tail, and that's
no snake story, either. I cut the flesh out to get rid of the poison.
I was n't in a college laboratory and I had to work fast and use what
tools I had with me. I killed the gentleman that did the mischief,
though," Vic added carelessly, deftly slipping down his sleeve as if to
change the subject.

"Oh, tell me about it, do," Elinor urged. "You were killing a snake the
first time I saw you."

How dainty and sweet sh