id, bitterly. "The
sins of the father, you know. An' the other side. How about Jorth?
Has he any children?"

What a curious gleam of surprise and conjecture Jean encountered in his
father's gaze!

"He has a daughter. Ellen Jorth. Named after her mother. The first
time I saw Ellen Jorth I thought she was a ghost of the girl I had
loved an' lost. Sight of her was like a blade in my side. But the
looks of her an' what she is--they don't gibe. Old as I am, my
heart--Bah! Ellen Jorth is a damned hussy!"

Jean Isbel went off alone into the cedars. Surrender and resignation
to his father's creed should have ended his perplexity and worry. His
instant and burning resolve to be as his father had represented him
should have opened his mind to slow cunning, to the craft of the
Indian, to the development of hate. But there seemed to be an
obstacle. A cloud in the way of vision. A face limned on his memory.

Those damning words of his father's had been a shock--how little or
great he could not tell. Was it only a day since he had met Ellen
Jorth? What had made all the difference? Suddenly like a breath the
fragrance of her hair came back to him. Then the sweet coolness of her
lips! Jean trembled. He looked around him as if he were pursued or
surrounded by eyes, by instincts, by fears, by incomprehensible things.

"Ahuh! That must be what ails me," he muttered. "The look of her--an'
that kiss--they've gone hard me. I should never have stopped to talk.
An' I'm to kill her father an' leave her to God knows what."

Something was wrong somewhere. Jean absolutely forgot that within the
hour he had pledged his manhood, his life to a feud which could be
blotted out only in blood. If he had understood himself he would have
realized that the pledge was no more thrilling and unintelligible in
its possibilities than this instinct which drew him irresistibly.

"Ellen Jorth! So--my dad calls her a damned hussy! So--that explains
the--the way she acted--why she never hit me when I kissed her. An'
her words, so easy an' cool-like. Hussy? That means she's bad--bad!
Scornful of me--maybe disappointed because my kiss was innocent! It
was, I swear. An' all she said: 'Oh, I've been kissed before.'"

Jean grew furious with himself for the spreading of a new sensation in
his breast that seemed now to ache. Had he become infatuated, all in a
day, with this Ellen Jorth? Was he jealous of the men who had the
privilege