g in
contempt.

"Nothing can keep us apart," said Milford. "I'm not a soft wooer; I
don't know how to play the he dove; I don't know how to sing a lie made
by some one else; I don't pretend to be a gentleman; I am out of the
rut, and they may call me unnatural. But let me tell you that all hell
can't keep us apart."

"Mr. Milford, you must not talk like that. I too am out of the rut, and
they may call me unnatural, but I do not like to hear you talk that
way."

"Yes, you do. You can't help yourself. If it's the devil that brought us
together, then blessed be the name of the devil."

"Hush, Mr. Milford."

"I won't hush. I must talk. I suppose I ought to call you an angel. But
you are not. You are a woman--once a hired hand. But you jump on me like
a panther; you suck the blood out of my heart. Am I a brute? Yes. So are
you. You are a beautiful brute--the panther and the grizzly. Is that
it?"

She looked at him, and her eyes were not soft. "I used to peep in at the
grizzly--into the dining-room when he had come to feed. But no more now.
No, nothing can keep us apart. But we must wait. What a courtship!" she
said, with a sigh.

"It's not a courtship," he replied. "It's a fight, a draw fight. Now
I'll hush. What's the wrangle?" he asked, turning toward Mrs. Goodwin.

"Nothing," she answered, moving closer to him. "It hasn't the dignity of
a wrangle. Mrs. Stuvic is trying to convert me to fortune-telling."

"Nothing of the sort," said Mrs. Stuvic. "I don't care whether she
believes in it or not. It's nothin' to me; but truth's truth, and you
can't get round it; no, Bill, you bet. I know what I've been told, and I
know what's come to pass. A woman told me that a man was goin' to beat
me out of board, and he did. She never saw him. How about that? And she
told me I was goin' to lose a cow, and I did. She was dead by the time I
got home. How about that? Don't come talkin' to me about what you expect
after you're dead. Truth's truth. Now, there's Bill. He thinks I'm an
old fool. But I know more than he thinks I do. Yes, you bet!"

"No, I don't think that, Mrs. Stuvic," Milford replied. "I'm under too
many obligations to you to think that."

"Now, there is honesty," Mrs. Goodwin spoke up. "Gunhild, my dear, do
you catch the drift of it?"

"It's not honesty, but villainy," Blakemore declared, and turning to his
wife, who had just returned, he asked if the boy were hurt. She said
that he had got hung in the forks of