It had never occurred to Red Saunders that he was afraid of anybody.  He even chuckled, when he got Lettis out of the way with a plausible excuse the next morning.  Then he strode briskly into the house, his question on his lips in a plump out-and-out form.

Miss Mattie looked at him with her slow smile.  “What is it?” she asked.

Red swallowed his question whole.  “I—­I wanted a little hot water to shave with,” said he.  Then a fury took hold of him.  “What the devil am I lying like this for?” he thought.  He exhorted himself to go on and say what he had to say like a man; but the other Red Saunders refused to do anything of the sort.  He took the cup of hot water most abjectly and fled from the house.  He had to shave then, and in his hurry and indignation he turned the operation into a clinic.  “Oh Jiminy!  Look at that!” he cried, as the razor opened up another part of the subject.  “There’s a slit an inch long!  If I keep on at this gait, I won’t have face enough to say good morning, let alone what I want to do.  What ails me?  What ails me?  Why should I be scart of the nicest woman God ever built?  Now by all the Mormon Gods!  I’ll post right into the house and say my little say as soon as these cuts stop bleeding!”

Cob-webs stopped the cuts, and other cob-webs stopped Red Saunders, late of the Chanta Seechee ranch; two hundred and fifty pounds of the very finest bone and muscle.  And the cob-webs held him, foaming and boiling with rage and disgust, calling himself all the yaller pups he could think of, but staying strictly within the safe limits of the barn.  It was a revelation to the big man, and not a pleasant one.  How was he to know that the most salient point of his apparent cowardice was nothing less worthy than respect for the woman’s purity?  That if he would stop swearing long enough to get at the springs of his action, he would find that he hesitated because the new light on the matter made huge shadows of the slips in the career of a strong, lawless, untrained but sorely tempted man?  He knew nothing of the sort, and the funniest of comedies took place in the barn.  He would reach the sensible stage.  “Pah!  All foolishness.  Go?  Of course he’d go, and this very minute, and have the thing done with, good or bad”; he was quite amused at his former conduct—­until he reached the door.  Then he’d skip nimbly back again, with a hot feeling that somebody was watching him, although a careful inspection through the crack of the door revealed no one.

Red discovered another thing that afternoon, which was that the more nervous you are the more nervous you get.  He groaned in perfect misery:  “Ohoho!  That I should have seen the day when I was afraid to ask anybody anything.  What’s come over me anyhow?  It’s this darn country, I believe—­’tain’t me,” then he stopped short.  “What you saying, Red?” he queried.  “Why don’t you own up like a man!” The fact that it had