voice shook a little as she asked, "Just why do you
think of me that way, Boone? Why am I--so far--out of reach?"

"Why!"--his question was an exclamation of amazement. "You've seen that
cabin where I was born, haven't you? You know what your people call my
people, don't you?... 'Poor white trash!' Between you and me there's a
gorge two hundred years wide. Your folks are those that won the West,
and mine are those that fell by the roadside and petered out and dry
rotted."

As he finished the speech which had been such a long one for him, he
stood waiting. Into the unsteady voice with which she put her last
question he had read the reserve of controlled anger--such as a just
judge would seek to hold in abeyance until everything was said. So he
braced himself and tried not to look at her--but he felt that the length
of time she held him in that tight-drawn suspense was a shade
cruel--unintentionally so, of course.

The girl's face told him nothing either, at first, but slowly into the
eyes came that scornful gleam that he had sometimes seen there when he
sought to modify the risk involved in some reckless caprice of her own
suggesting: a disdain for all things calculatedly cautious.

At last she spoke.

"You could say every one of those things about Lincoln," was her
surprising pronunciamento. "You could say most of them about Napoleon or
any big man that won out on his own. When I brought you that little
bust, I thought you'd like it. I thought you had that same kind of a
spirit--and courage."

"But, Anne--"

"I didn't interrupt you," she reminded him. "My idea of a real man is
one who doesn't talk timidly about gorges--whether they're two hundred
years wide, as you call it, or not. Napoleon wouldn't have been let into
a kitchen door at court--so he came in through the front way with a
triumphal arch built over it. _He_ knocked down barriers, and got what
he wanted."

"Then--" his voice rang out suddenly--"then if I can ever get up to
where you stand I won't be 'poor white trash' to you?"

She shook her head and her eyes glowed with invincible spirit. "You'll
be a man--that wasn't fainthearted," she told him honestly. "One that
was brave enough to live his own life as I mean to live my own."

"Anne," he said fervently, "you asked me if I'd miss anything but the
hills. I'll miss _you_--like--all hell--because I love you like that."

They were on a mountain top, with no one to see them. They were almost
child