lared up in his turn, and
he whipped his hand back toward his pistol-pocket, only to discover that
he was not armed, as he evidently thought he was. However, he kept his
hand behind him in a threatening attitude.

"I'll show you what I've got to do with it if you open your dirty jaws
like that again!" Henley said, fearlessly. "You dare to draw a gun on me
and I'll make you swallow your own teeth. Now, you get out of here!"
And, taking him by the arm in a grip of steel, Henley drew him hurriedly
to the door and shoved him down the steps.

"This ain't the end of it," Bradley threw back furiously. "You bet it
ain't."

"It'll be the end o' _you_ if you fool with me!" Henley retorted, and he
turned back into the store and resumed his seat at his desk. He had not
been there long when one of the women finished her purchases and, with
some parcels under her arm, came back and stood timidly by his desk. It
was Mrs. Cartwright, the old widow whose son Johnny was so devoted to
Carrie Wade. She was short in stature, had iron-gray hair, was slight
and stooped, and wore a plain gingham dress and a sunbonnet of the same
material.

"It was powerful good of you, Alfred, to do what you did jest now," she
said, timidly, as he looked up. "It was like the old-time way men had
when I was a girl of takin' up for women. I always heard you was good
and kind, and now I know it. A man kin do a lot o' things that women
will appreciate, but I'll risk my all that every woman in that bunch
down thar will go home wishin' that her husband or brother had done what
you did an' in the same sperit. Women love, above all things, to be
protected by manly men."

"Well," said Henley, his flush of anger giving way to one of genuine
embarrassment, "he was upsetting business, Mrs. Cartwright. I hated
to--to git mad that way, but he was running my trade away, and that's a
thing I won't let no man do right under my eyes. Set down an' rest, Mrs.
Cartwright; you don't look overly stout."

The woman took the chair near his desk, and he heard her sigh as she
massed her parcels in her lap with her thin, quivering hands.

"I reckon I don't look well," she said, seeing that his kindly eyes were
still on her. "They say worry will kill a body quicker 'n anything else,
and, Alfred, I'm worried mighty nigh to death. I don't know which way to
turn or what to do. It is all about my youngest child, Johnny. He's took
a quar notion to marry Carrie Wade."

"I see, I see,"