addle.
Through all his mental misery, through all his physical discomfort, a
single lovely thought sustained him. There was only one really good
riding road in that vicinity! And it was shady! And, thank Heaven, it
was most inordinately short!

But Eve Edgarton falsified the thought before he was half through
thinking it.

She swung her horse around, reared him to almost a perpendicular
height, merged herself like so much fluid khaki into his great,
towering, threatening neck, reacted almost instantly to her own
balance again, and went plunging off toward the wild, rough,
untraveled foot-hills and--certain destruction, any unbiased onlooker
would have been free to affirm!

Snortingly the chunky gray went tearing after her. A trifle sulkily
Barton's roan took up the chase.

Shade? Oh, ye gods! If Eve Edgarton knew shade when she saw it she
certainly gave no possible sign of such intelligence. Wherever the
galloping, grass-grown road hesitated between green-roofed forest and
devastated wood-lot, she chose the devastated wood-lot! Wherever the
trotting, treacherous pasture faltered between hobbly, rock-strewn
glare and soft, lush-carpeted spots of shade, she chose the hobbly,
rock-strewn glare! On and on and on! Till dust turned sweat! And sweat
turned dust again! On and on and on! With the riderless gray thudding
madly after her! And Barton's sulky roan balking frenziedly at each
new swerve and turn!

It must have been almost three miles before Barton quite overtook her.
Then in the scudding, transitory shadow of a growly thunder-cloud she
reined in suddenly, waited patiently till Barton's panting horse was
nose and nose with hers, and then, pushing her slouch hat back from
her low, curl-fringed forehead, jogged listlessly along beside him
with her pale olive face turned inquiringly to his drenched,
beet-colored visage.

"What was it that you wanted me to do for you, Mr. Barton?" she asked
with a laborious sort of courtesy. "Are you writing a book or
something that you wanted me to help you about? Is that it? Is that
what Father meant?"

"Am I writing a--book?" gasped Barton. Desperately he began to mop his
forehead. "Writing a book? Am--I--writing--a--book? Heaven forbid!"

"What are you doing?" persisted the girl bluntly.

"What am I doing?" repeated Barton. "Why, riding with you! Trying to
ride with you!" he called out grimly as, taking the lead impetuously
again, Eve Edgarton's horse shied off at a rabbit