water, green herons flapped upward, protesting harshly,
circled overhead with leisurely wing-beats, and settled on some dead
limb, thin, strange shapes against the deepening orange of the western
heavens.

Portlaw, sitting his saddle gingerly, patronized nature askance; and he
saw across the flooded meadow where the river sand had piled its
smothering blanket--which phenomenon he was guiltily aware was due to
him.

Everywhere were signs of the late overflow--raw new gravel channels for
Painted Creek; river willows bent low where the flood had winnowed;
piles of driftwood jammed here and there; a single stone pier stemming
mid-stream, ancient floor and cover gone. More of his work--or the
consequences of it--this desolation; from which, under his horse's feet,
rose a hawk, flapping, furious, a half-drowned snake dangling from the
talon-clutch.

"Ugh!" muttered Portlaw, bringing his startled horse under discipline;
then forged forward across the drowned lands, sorry for his work, sorry
for his obstinacy, sorrier for himself; for Portlaw, in some matters was
illogically parsimonious; and it irked him dreadfully to realise how
utterly indefensible were his actions and how much they promised to cost
him.

"Unless," he thought cannily to himself, "I can fix it up with her--for
old friendship's sake--bah!--doing the regretful sinner business--"

As the horse thrashed out of the drowned lands up into the flat plateau
where acres of alders, their tops level as a trimmed hedge, stretched
away in an even, green sea, a distant, rapping sound struck his ear,
sharp, regular as the tree-tapping of a cock-o'-the-woods.

Indifferently convinced that the great, noisy woodpecker was the cause
of the racket, he rode on toward the hard-wood ridge dominating this
plateau where his guests, last season, had shot woodcock--one of the
charges in the suit against him.

"The thing to do," he ruminated, "is to throw myself gracefully on her
mercy. Women like to have a chance to forgive you; Louis says so, and he
ought to know. What a devilishly noisy woodpecker!"

And, looking up, he drew bridle sharply.

For there, on the wood's edge, stood a familiar gray mare, and in the
saddle, astride, sat Alida Ascott, busily hammering tacks into a
trespass notice printed on white muslin, and attached to the trunk of a
big maple-tree.

So absorbed was she in her hammering that at first she neither heard nor
saw Portlaw when he finally ventured to