n the descending road. To Molly
Wood he was a stranger; but she had seen his eyes when he nodded to her
lover, and she knew, even without the pistol, that this was not enmity
at first sight. It was not indeed. Five years of gathered hate had
looked out of the man's eyes. And she asked her lover who this was.

"Oh," said he, easily, "just a man I see now and then."

"Is his name Trampas?" said Molly Wood.

The Virginian looked at her in surprise. "Why, where have you seen him?"
he asked.

"Never till now. But I knew."

"My gracious! Yu' never told me yu' had mind-reading powers." And he
smiled serenely at her.

"I knew it was Trampas as soon as I saw his eyes."

"My gracious!" her lover repeated with indulgent irony. "I must be
mighty careful of my eyes when you're lookin' at 'em."

"I believe he did that murder," said the girl.

"Whose mind are yu' readin' now?" he drawled affectionately.

But he could not joke her off the subject. She took his strong hand in
hers, tremulously, so much of it as her little hand could hold. "I know
something about that--that--last autumn," she said, shrinking from words
more definite. "And I know that you only did--"

"What I had to," he finished, very sadly, but sternly, too.

"Yes," she asserted, keeping hold of his hand. "I suppose
that--lynching--" (she almost whispered the word) "is the only way. But
when they had to die just for stealing horses, it seems so wicked that
this murderer--"

"Who can prove it?" asked the Virginian.

"But don't you know it?"

"I know a heap o' things inside my heart. But that's not proving. There
was only the body, and the hoofprints--and what folks guessed."

"He was never even arrested!" the girl said.

"No. He helped elect the sheriff in that county."

Then Molly ventured a step inside the border of her lover's reticence.
"I saw--" she hesitated, "just now, I saw what you did."

He returned to his caressing irony. "You'll have me plumb scared if you
keep on seein' things."

"You had your pistol ready for him."

"Why, I believe I did. It was mighty unnecessary." And the Virginian
took out the pistol again, and shook his head over it, like one who has
been caught in a blunder.

She looked at him, and knew that she must step outside his reticence
again. By love and her surrender to him their positions had been
exchanged.

He was not now, as through his long courting he had been, her
half-obeying, half-refractory worshipper. S