over and speak to her after they had gone a few paces. His lips
were close to her ear, but though his voice was low and repressed, the
words were distinctly audible to the young man.

"Ruth darling, I am sorry,--I can't tell you how sorry I am for having
subjected you to this insult. God, if I could only help matters by
resenting it, I--"

She broke in, her voice as clear as a bell.

"Oh, if I were only a man,--if I were only a man!"

They were well out of hearing before Percival looked despairingly up at
the pink and grey sky and muttered with heartfelt earnestness:

"I wish to God you were. I'd like nothing better than to be soundly
threshed by you."

CHAPTER IX.

Just before sunset that evening, Sancho Mendez was publicly hanged.
Confessing the crime, he was carried to the rude gibbet at the far edge
of the wheat field and paid the price in full. He had been tried by a
jury of twelve; and there was absolutely no question as to his guilt.
His companion, a lad named Dominic, callously betrayed by the older man,
fled to the forest and it was not until the second day after the
hanging that he was found by a party of man-hunters, half-starved and
half-demented. He was hanged at sunrise on the following day.

Manuel Crust considered himself glorified. After a fashion, he posed
as a martyr. Some sort of cunning, as insidious as it was unexpected,
caused him to assume an air of humility. He went about shaking his head
sorrowfully, as if cut to the quick by the unjust suspicions that had
been heaped upon him by the ignorant, easily-persuaded populace.

Sentiment began to swing toward him. He and his so-called followers were
vindicated. It was his gloomy, dejected contention that if Providence
had not intervened he and his honest fellows undoubtedly would have been
placed in the most direful position, so strong and so bitter was
the prejudice that conspired against him. He was constantly thanking
Providence. And presently other people undertook to thank Providence
too. They began to regard Manuel as a much-abused man.

The burly "Portugee" haunted the cabin of Pedro the farmer. He was the
most solicitous and the most active of all who strove to befriend and
encourage the unhappy father, and no one was more devoted than he to the
slowly-recovering girl. He carried flowers to Pedro's hut; he did many
chores for Pedro's wife; he went out into the woods and killed the
plumpest birds he could find and cooked