and this very clearly. Hereafter you will keep
your nose out of things that don't concern you. You will keep away from
me and mine, which includes my niece. Do you understand that?"

"I hear what you say," Angus returned. "But nobody but herself is going
to forbid me to go to your niece's ranch."

"I forbid you," said Godfrey French. "I won't have you hanging around
there. I won't have her name coupled with yours."

"I did not know it was being coupled," Angus said, "and I do not think
it is. But if it is--what then?"

"What then!" Godfrey French exclaimed. "Have you the consummate
impudence to imagine that my niece would think twice of an ignorant
young hawbuck without birth or education? Bah! You're a young fool!"

At the words, entirely insolent, vibrant with contempt, a hot fire of
anger began to blow within Angus. With all his heart he wished that
Godfrey French had been minus the thirty years he had regretted.

"Those are hard words," he said, and it was characteristic of him that
as his anger rose his voice was very quiet.

"True words," Godfrey French returned.

"At any rate," Angus told him, "I make a clean living by hard work."

"And I suppose you think 'A man's a man for a' that,'" Godfrey French
sneered. "Don't give me any rotten nonsense about democracy and
equality."

"I am not going to," Angus replied. "I think myself that every tub
should stand on its own bottom. But if, as you seem to think, there is
something in a man's blood, then perhaps mine is as good as your own."

"Fine blood!" Godfrey French commented with bitter irony. "Wild, hairy
Highlanders, caterans and reivers for five hundred years!"

"Ay," Angus Mackay agreed with a grim smile, "and maybe for five hundred
years back of that. But always pretty men of their hands, good friends
and bad enemies, and ill to frighten or drive." Then, following the
custom of his blood, he returned insult for insult. He launched it
deliberately, coldly. "And it is not claiming much for the blood of a
Mackay to say it is as good as that which comes from any shockheaded
kernes spawned by a Galway bog."

White to his twitching lips, Godfrey French struck him in the face.
Angus caught his hand, but made no attempt to return the blow.

"I think you had better go," he said. "You have too many years on your
head for me."

Godfrey French stepped back.

"That is my misfortune," he said. "Well--I have sons. Remember what I
told you, young man."

"I wi