you said you care for me?"

For answer the red lower lip trembled. That was all.

The man came a step forward, and another.

"Tell me, Bess," he demanded. "Don't you love me?"

"I have told you," said a low voice.

Answering, coercing, swift as the swoop of a prairie hawk, as a human
being in abandon, the man's arms were about her. Ere the girl could move
or resist, his lips were upon her lips. "You must go then," he
commanded. "I'll compel you to go." He kissed her again, hungrily,
irresistibly. "I won't take no for an answer. You will go."

"Don't, please," pleaded a voice, breathless from its owner's impotent
effort to be free. "You must not, we must not--yet. I'm bad, I know, but
not wholly. Please let me go."

Unconscious of time, unconscious of place, oblivious to aught save the
moment, the man held his ground, joying in his victory, in her effort to
escape. Save that one casual glance long before, he had not looked out
of doors. Had he done so, had he seen--.

But he had forgotten that a world existed without those four walls. His
back was toward the door. His own great shoulders walled the girl in.
Neither he nor she dreamed of a dark figure that had drifted from out
the prairie swiftly into the dooryard, dreamed that that same
all-knowing shadow, on soundless moccasined feet, had advanced to the
doorway, stood silent, watching therein. As the first man and the first
woman were alone, they fancied themselves alone. As the first man might
have exulted over his mate, Clayton Craig exulted now.

"Let you go, Bess," he baited, "let you go now that I've just gotten
you?" He laughed passionately. "You must think that I'm made of clay and
not of flesh and blood." He drew her closer and closer, until she could
no longer struggle, until she lay still in his arms. "I'll never let you
go again, girl, not if God himself were to demand your release. You're
mine, Bess, mine by right of capture, mine--"

The sentence halted midway; halted in a gasp and an unintelligible
muttering in the throat. Of a sudden, darkening, ominous, fateful, the
shadow within the entrance had silently advanced until it stood beside
them, paused so with folded arms. Simultaneously the wife and the
invader saw, realised. Instantly, instinctively, like similar repellent
poles, they sprang apart. Enveloped in a maze of surging divergent
passions, the two guilty humans stood silent so, staring at the intruder
in breathless expectation, breath