“Lucy, never mind,” whispered Slone.  “I’d stood to be shot just for this.”

He felt her hands softly on his face, feeling around tenderly till they found the swollen bruise on mouth and chin.

“Ah! . . .  He struck you.  And I—­I’ll kiss you,” she whispered.  “If kisses will make it well—­it’ll be well!”

She seemed strange, wild, passionate in her tenderness.  She lifted her face and kissed him softly again and again and again, till the touch that had been exquisitely painful to his bruised lips became rapture.  Then she leaned back in his arms, her hands on his shoulders, white-faced, dark-eyed, and laughed up in his face, lovingly, daringly, as if she defied the world to change what she had done.

“Lucy!  Lucy! . . .  He can beat me—­again!” said Slone, low and hoarsely.

“If you love me you’ll keep out of his way,” replied the girl.

“If I love you? . . .  My God! . . .  I’ve felt my heart die a thousand times since that mornin’—­when—­when you—­”

“Lin, I didn’t know,” she interrupted, with sweet, grave earnestness.  “I know now!”

And Slone could not but know, too, looking at her; and the sweetness, the eloquence, the noble abandon of her avowal sounded to the depths of him.  His dread, his resignation, his shame, all sped forever in the deep, full breath of relief with which he cast off that burden.  He tasted the nectar of happiness, the first time in his life.  He lifted his head—­never, he knew, to lower it again.  He would be true to what she had made him.

“Come in the shade,” he whispered, and with his arm round her he led her to the great tree-trunk.  “Is it safe for you here?  An’ how long can you stay?”

“I had it out with Dad—­left him licked once in his life,” she replied.  “Then I went to my room, fastened the door, and slipped out of my window.  I can stay out as long as I want.  No one will know.”

Slone’s heart throbbed.  She was his.  The clasp of her hands on his, the gleam of her eyes, the white, daring flash of her face in the shadow of the moon—­these told him she was his.  How it had come about was beyond him, but he realized the truth.  What a girl!  This was the same nerve which she showed when she had run Wildfire out in front of the fleetest horses in the uplands.

“Tell me, then,” he began, quietly, with keen gaze roving under the trees and eyes strained tight, “tell me what’s come off.”

“Don’t you know?” she queried, in amaze.

“Only that for some reason I’m done in Bostil’s Ford.  It can’t be because I punched Joel Creech.  I felt it before I met Bostil at the store.  He taunted me.  We had bitter words.  He told before all of them how the outfit I wore you gave me.  An’ then I dared him to race the King.  My horse an’ my life against you!”

“Yes, I know,” she whispered, softly.  “It’s all over town. . . .  Oh, Lin! it was a grand bet!  And Bostil four-flushed, as the riders say.  For days a race between Wildfire and the King had been in the air.  There’ll never be peace in Bostil’s Ford again till that race is run.”