d ax was thrust within his belt. He wore only a
cotton shirt open at the neck, dirty throughout, patched jeans
trousers, and a soft hat, green from long use. Beneath the shading
brim showed a loutish face, the coarse features swollen from
dissipation, the small black eyes bleared, yet alert and penetrating
in their darting, furtive glances. It was Dan Hodges, a man of
unsavory repute. The girl, though unafraid, blessed the instinct that
had guided her to avoid a meeting.

There were two prime factors in Plutina's detestation of Hodges. The
first was due to his insolence, as she deemed it, in aspiring for her
favor. With little training in conventional ideas of delicacy, the
girl had, nevertheless, a native refinement not always characteristic
of her more-cultured sister women. There was to her something
unspeakably repugnant in the fact that this bestial person should dare
to think of her intimately. It was as if she were polluted by his
dreaming of her kisses, of her yielding to his caresses. That he had
so aspired she knew, for he had told her of his desire with the coarse
candor of his kind. Her spurning of the uncouth advances had excited
his wrath; it had not destroyed his hopes. He had even ventured to
renew his suit, after the news of an engagement between Plutina and
Zeke had gone abroad. He had winced under the scourge of the girl'
scorn, but he had shown neither penitence nor remorse. Plutina had
forborne any account of this trouble to her lover, lest, by bad blood
between the two men, a worse thing befall.

The second cause of the girl's feeling was less direct, though of
longer standing, and had to do with the death of her father. That
Siddon, while yet in his prime, had been slain in a raid on a still
by the revenue officers, and that despite the fact that he was not
concerned in the affair, save by the unfortunate chance of being
present. Plutina, though only a child at the time, could still
remember the horror of that event. There was a singular personal
guiltiness, too, in her feeling, for, on the occasion of the raid, her
grandfather had been looking out from a balcony, and had seen the
revenue men urging their horses up the trail, the sunlight glinting on
their carbines. He had seized the great horn, to blow a warning to
those at the secret still on the mountain above. Plutina could
remember yet the grotesque bewilderment on his face, as no sound
issued--then the wrath and despair. The children, in a