l--things
that mean a great deal in childhood. But keep your heart open, and other
things will come."

"Perhaps when I get to be twenty-four years old and as big as you are I
can talk that way, and believe it, too. But just now I'm only a girl
that doesn't believe she's grown up, even if they do tell her so, and
tell her she mustn't be a playmate any longer. And you are not to ride
with me any more, and you are not to come to my house nor may I come to
yours. That's what they say. What are we to do, then?"

She cried her question passionately. He had no answer ready. Platitudes
would not do for this child, he reflected, and to lecture her then even
on the A B C's of the social code would be wounding her ingenuous faith.

"If this is the way it all turns out, and I can't have your friendship
any longer, what is it that you're going to do or I'm going to do?" she
insisted. "That's losing too much, just because one is grown up."

Tenderness surged in his heart toward this motherless girl--tenderness
in which there was a new quality. But he had no answer for her just
then. He did not understand his own emotions. He was as unsophisticated
as she in the affairs of the heart. His man's life of the woods had kept
him free from women. His friendship with this child, their rides, their
companionship, had been almost on the plane of boy with boy; her
character invited that kind of intimacy.

And so he wondered what to say; for her demand had been explicit, and
she demanded candor in return.

At that moment he welcomed the appearance of even Ivus Niles. That sooty
prophet of ill appeared around a bend in the road ahead. The twilight
shrouded him, but there was no mistaking his stove-pipe hat and his
frock-coat. He was leading his buck sheep, and the hounds rushed forward
clamorously. Niles stopped in the middle of the road, and let them
frolic about him and his emblematic captive.

"The dogs won't hurt you, Niles," Harlan assured him, spurring forward.

"I ain't afraid of dogs, I ain't afraid of wolves, not after what I've
been through with the political Bengal tigers I've been up against
to-day," Niles assured him, sourly. "And your grandfather is the old he
one of the pack. You tell him--"

"You can take your own messages to my grandfather, Niles." He swung his
horse to pass, the girl at his side, but the War Eagle threw up his hand
commandingly.

"I've got a message for you, yourself, then, and you stay here and take