nt.

"Why, children!" exclaimed Molly.

"He's said his prayers and everything," they all screamed out. "He's a
rustler, and we're lynchin' him. Jump, Bob!"

"I don't want--"

"Ah, coward, won't take his medicine!"

"Let him go, boys," said Molly. "You might really hurt him." And so she
broke up this game, but not without general protest from Wyoming's young
voice.

"He said he would," Henry Dow assured her.

And George Taylor further explained: "He said he'd be Steve. But Steve
didn't scare." Then George proceeded to tell the schoolmarm, eagerly,
all about Steve and Ed, while the schoolmarm looked at him with a rigid
face.

"You promised your mother you'd not tell," said Henry Dow, after all
had been told. "You've gone and done it," and Henry wagged his head n a
superior manner.

Thus did the New England girl learn what her cow-boy lover had done. She
spoke of it to nobody; she kept her misery to herself. He was not there
to defend his act. Perhaps in a way that was better. But these were
hours of darkness indeed to Molly Wood.

On that visit to Dunbarton, when at the first sight of her lover's
photograph in frontier dress her aunt had exclaimed, "I suppose there
are days when he does not kill people," she had cried in all good faith
and mirth, "He never killed anybody!" Later, when he was lying in her
cabin weak from his bullet wound, but each day stronger beneath her
nursing, at a certain word of his there had gone through her a shudder
of doubt. Perhaps in his many wanderings he had done such a thing in
self-defence, or in the cause of popular justice. But she had pushed the
idea away from her hastily, back into the days before she had ever seen
him. If this had ever happened, let her not know of it. Then, as a cruel
reward for his candor and his laying himself bare to her mother, the
letters from Bennington had used that very letter of his as a weapon
against him. Her sister Sarah had quoted from it. "He says with apparent
pride," wrote Sarah, "that he has never killed for pleasure or profit.'
Those are his exact words, and you may guess their dreadful effect upon
mother. I congratulate you, my dear, on having chosen a protector so
scrupulous."

Thus her elder sister had seen fit to write; and letters from less near
relatives made hints at the same subject. So she was compelled to accept
this piece of knowledge thrust upon her. Yet still, still, those events
had been before she knew him. They were rem