rider in their choking depths. Even the traces of human struggle,
the uprooted stakes, scattered fence-rails, and empty post-holes were
forever hidden under these billows of verdure. Midway of the field
and near the water-course arose McKinstry's barn--the solitary human
structure whose rude, misshapen, bulging sides and swallow-haunted eaves
bursting with hay from the neighboring pasture, seemed however only
an extravagant growth of the prolific soil. Mrs. McKinstry gazed at it
anxiously. There was no sign of life or movement near or around it; it
stood as it had always stood, deserted and solitary. But turning her
eyes to the right, beyond the water-course, she could see a slight
regular undulation of the grassy sea and what appeared to be the
drifting on its surface of half a dozen slouched hats in the direction
of the alders. There was no longer any doubt; a party from the other
side was approaching the border.

A shout and the quick galloping of hoofs behind her sent a thrill of
relief to her heart. She had barely time to draw aside as her husband
and his followers swept past her down the slope. But it needed not
his furious cry, "The Harrisons hev sold us out," to tell her that the
crisis had come.

She held her breath as the cavalcade diverged, and in open order
furiously approached the water-course, and she could see a sudden check
and hesitation in the movement in the meadow at that unlooked-for onset.
Then she thought of the barn. It would be a rallying-point for them if
driven back--a tower of defence if besieged. There were arms secreted
beneath the hay for such an emergency. She would run there, swing-to its
open doors, and get ready to barricade them.

She ran crouchingly, seeking the higher grasses and brambles of the
ridge to escape observation from the meadow until she could descend upon
the barn from the rear. She threw aside her impeding shawl; her brown
holland sun-bonnet, torn off her head and hanging by its strings from
her shoulders, let her coarse silver-threaded hair stream like a mane
over her back; her face and hands were bleeding from thorns and whitened
by dust. But she struggled on fiercely like some hunted animal until
she reached the descending trail, when, letting herself go blindly, only
withheld by the long grasses she clutched at wildly on either side, she
half fell, half stumbled down the slope and emerged beside the barn,
breathless and exhausted.

But what a contrast was there!