a
sleep-walker, and to the sleep-walker only the dream is real--yet he had
only to be waked to step again into sanity. The steel had been too
gradually forged, tempered and tested to become pig iron again in a
breath, simply because it dreamed itself pig iron.

"You talk of your strength, and I call on you to test it. I call on you
to do not what any persuasive agitator could do, but what only you can
do--to keep the wild-beast impulses in your own men caged for one more
day--and to spend that day with your own conscience."

"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old
friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to
impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting
me very easy tasks tonight!"

"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not
for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser
strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then
abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your
teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."

Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as
though under a lash.

"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly
demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is
no apostle of tame submission."

Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well,
the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to
confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously
refrained from mentioning until now.

"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips.
You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a
mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his
blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you
a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."

She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it
questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"

Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more--a
request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."

Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either
acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood
holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a
painful thing to watch, and after a l