at
if it had suthin' to do with my answer to what you said just now?"

"It couldn't. So, if it's all the same to you, Miss Budd, I'd rather ye
wouldn't."

"That," said the lady still more archly, lifting a playful finger, "is
your temper."

"Mebbe it is," said Abner suddenly, with a wondering sense of relief.

It was, however, settled that Miss Budd should go to Sacramento to visit
her friends, that Abner would join her later, when their engagement
would be announced, and that she should not return to the hotel until
they were married. The compact was sealed by the interchange of a
friendly kiss from Miss Budd with a patient, tolerating one from Abner,
and then it suddenly occurred to them both that they might as well
return to their duties in the hotel, which they did. Miss Budd's entire
outing that Sunday lasted only half an hour.

A week elapsed. Miss Budd was in Sacramento, and the landlord of the Big
Flume Hotel was standing at his usual post in the doorway during dinner,
when a waiter handed him a note. It contained a single line scrawled in
pencil:--

"Come out and see me behind the house as before. I dussent come in on
account of her. C. BYERS."

"On account of 'her'!" Abner cast a hurried glance around the tables.
Certainly Mrs. Byers was not there! He walked in the hall and the
veranda--she was not there. He hastened to the rendezvous evidently
meant by the writer, the wilderness behind the house. Sure enough,
Byers, drunk and maudlin, supporting himself by the tree root, staggered
forward, clasped him in his arms, and murmured hoarsely,--

"She's gone!"

"Gone?" echoed Abner, with a whitening face. "Mrs. Byers? Where?"

"Run away! Never come back no more! Gone!"

A vague idea that had been in Abner's mind since Byers's last visit now
took awful shape. Before the unfortunate Byers could collect his senses
he felt himself seized in a giant's grasp and forced against the tree.

"You coward!" said all that was left of the tolerant Abner--his even
voice--"you hound! Did you dare to abuse her? to lay your vile hands on
her--to strike her? Answer me."

The shock--the grasp--perhaps Abner's words, momentarily silenced Byers.
"Did I strike her?" he said dazedly; "did I abuse her? Oh, yes!" with
deep irony. "Certainly! In course! Look yer, pardner!"--he suddenly
dragged up his sleeve from his red, hairy arm, exposing a blue cicatrix
in its centre--"that's a jab from her scissors about three months a