d
how dangerous a man he was. I began to comprehend something of the long
complex formula that goes to make up a human identity, and it was a
discovery as startling as when a fellow perched on his grandfather's
shoulder sees through the key-hole a tangle of wheels all going behind
the white face of the clock.

I had been deftly handled by this Woodford, and yet I had not seemed to
be. He had striven to move me to his will with a sort of masked edging,
and, failing in that, left me with the bitterness drawn out. More than
that,--shrewd and far-sighted man,--taken hot against him, I was almost
won over to his star.

Under the hammering of the hard-headed Ump, I saw Woodford in another
light. But I carried no ill will. He had jousted hard and lost, and
youth holds no post-mortems. But the flock of night birds had not flown
out into the sun. Dislodged from one quarter, they flapped across my
heart to another ridgepole.

Woodford had been holding the blue hills with his men, and we knew what
it meant to go up against him. But down yonder in among the Lares of our
house, one worked against us with her nimble fingers. My heart went hard
against the woman.

If she drew back from our floorboard, there was the tongue in her head
to say it. No obligation bound her. True, we had given her of our love
freely. But it was a thing no man could set a price on, and no man could
pay, save as he told back the coin which he had borrowed. And failing in
that coin, it was a debt beyond him.

The door to our house stood pulled back on its hinges. Nothing barred it
but the sun. If the god Whim was piping, she could follow to the world's
end. One might as well bow out the woman when her blood is cooling.
Against the human heart the king's writs have never run.

I slapped my pocket above the letter. The current had turned and was
running landward. The evil thing cast out upon its flood was riding
back. I hoped it might sting cruelly the hand that flung it.

I rose in my stirrups and shook my youthful fists at the hills beyond
the Gauley. I could see the smile dying on her red mouth when one came
to say that her plans were ship-wrecked.

Then I thought of Ward, and something fluttered in my throat. He was
under the spell of this slim, brown-haired witch. She was in his blood,
running to his finger-tips. She was on him like the sun. Why could not
the woman see what the good God was handing down to her? It was the
treasure worth a kingdom.