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 Just stood that way, haughtily, coldly; displeasure, contempt, in his sneering little face. He turned to Bill Connor again, having cut the impudent jerry to the bone.

Tom Laylander's face burned with the insult; his heart seemed to drop so low in his mortification that it hit the ground. He went on, lame of foot from his high-heeled boots, which were made for the saddle, and not the ballast bed of a railroad. His hands were blistered by the tamping-bar that he had swung with the killing vigor of a greenhorn for the longest ten hours he ever had lived.

Laylander's pistol was buckled around him, as he had worn it all day, much to the entertainment of the jerries, the leather of his belt sweat-soaked and sagging, his body galled from the drag of it. He wondered what he had done to forfeit the friendship of Banjo Gibson, quite innocent yet of the barrier that he had raised between himself and other railroad men when he went to work for Orrin Smith on the section.

The jerry, to the better paid, more pleasantly employed railroad men, was a sort of clown, a comical low fellow to be laughed at and treated with jest, and regarded with complacent self-felicitation on one's natural and social superiority over him. These more fortunate servants of the same master drew a rigid social line. This was as pronounced between conductor, engineer, brakeman, fireman, shop mechanic and the like on one hand; the jerry on the other, as between white men and black.

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 Mrs. Cowgill was fully cognizant of this social division. She knew she was going squarely in the face of public prejudice when she took Tom Laylander to board as a section hand. It did not need Pap's objections, nor Banjo Gibson's scorn, to tell her this. But she liked the boy. She did not have the heart to hurt him by pointing out an inferiority that was not his, that he did not and could not feel.

But she would draw the line with Tom. No other jerry could sit at her table or sleep in her beds. Railroad men washed up and put on clean collars and clean clothes before coming to supper. They went out in the morning to the shops looking like gentlemen, their greasy garments in neat rolls under their arms. She knew how the jerries at Ryan's came and went in the same clothes day after day, sneaking a bar of soap from Mrs. Ryan on Sunday to wash their shirts and overalls in the river. Nobody could blame a railroad man for refusing to sit with such a crowd at the table. Goosie would not wait on men like that.

It was a big concession, therefore, to lodge Tom Laylander after he had fallen to the low estate of section hand. It was not mercenary; she had plenty of boarders without him. It was nothing in the world but that assertion of tenderness and humanity that dies so hard in people's breasts, living in most of us long after we believe we have smothered it in the interest of our business and social success.

Tom came to supper as fresh as a pink, tidy in a clean shirt and, his cougar-skin vest hiding his

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 suspenders from the ladies' eyes. Mrs. Cowgill believed he even had gone to the trouble to shave. Orrin Smith, the section boss, had finished his supper and gone; Goosie had put a pair of cowhands at his table. She was sitting at the foot of the long common table, taking her supper with Bill Connor. Everybody else had cleaned up their pie and gone.

Mrs. Cowgill led Tom to a little table in a secluded corner, even farther away from the center of activities than she had intended. It was a pleasant situation beside a window. The evening wind was blowing the draggled lace curtains, bringing in with it a scent of curing prairie hay.

"After you wait on Tom, take your own supper," Mrs. Cowgill directed Louise. "Goosie she's about through; she'll catch anybody that happens in."

Tom hung his gun on the back of his chair, and stood a moment hesitantly deferential, as if he could not bring himself to sit down first in the presence of a lady. His face was red from the heat and sweat of the day, which something that he had put on it out of a little bottle with a ribbon around its neck had stimulated. This was a lotion thought to be very balmy and refreshing to the freshly shaved railroad face. It was in strong demand at Earl Gray's drug store.

"You're late, Mr. Laylander. There isn't much left," Louise said.

"Anything the cook can throw on a dish will do," Tom replied, growing redder, as if the lotion struck deeper every moment.

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 "Liver or steak?" Louise inquired, trying to look and feel detached and indifferent, as became her profession, but fighting a great deal harder to keep from smiling in the ingenuous young man's face. "I could get you some French fried, if you like them."

"I love 'em!" Tom declared, with such ardent simplicity that the smile could be restrained no longer.

Louise looked up; Tom, still standing beside the chair, tall and bashful and red, looked down. Each smiled into the other's eyes, and both felt more comfortable, the constraint removed, the way to something friendly, even steak and liver, made clear.

"I recommend the steak," said Louise, in advisory tone.

"It'll hit me fine, ma'am," said Tom, hand on the back of the chair as respectfully as if he waited for the roadmaster, or the section boss, or the governor, or somebody equally high and important, to depart. "But I'm not in any kind of a hurry," Tom protested. "You go ahead and get your own supper first."

"Certainly not," Louise returned, so decisively it made the young man start as if Cal Withers had taken a shot at him through the window. "But I'll take it along with you—if you don't mind," Louise proposed, smiling away the confusion her apparently snappish refusal had brought upon him.

"I'll be honored and delighted," said Tom. "I've been wantin' to have a little talk with you ever since you stepped out there in the road—"

"Wait till I bring on the supper," she suggested.

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 Tom found himself up against a ledge when it came to going into the subject of his obligation to Louise for stepping between him and Cal Withers when the odds stood so heavily against him that day. It was past, and it deserved nothing but to be forgotten, she said.

"That's easy to say, Miss Gardner, ma'am, but not so easy done. I owe you nothing short of my life. They'd 'a' got me that time; I didn't know he was goin' to bring out a bunch of them."

"They say it's his way. But forget about it, Mr. Laylander." She put her hand on his with a quick hovering touch, like the lighting of a bird, looking her appeal for no more thanks into his eyes.

"I'll have to let it pass, then, with this said, till you're better paid," he yielded. "Please just call me Tom. I'm nothing at all but a common jerry now."

"And I'm nothing but a common biscuit-shooter; call me Louise. But why do you say you're nothing but a jerry? A jerry is the same as any other railroader to me."

"Not to everybody," said Tom, shaking his head sadly. "It didn't strike me that it was such a poor and low-down job till that little Banjo Gibson man refused to speak to me this evenin'. He acted like I'd given him a mortal insult."

"Oh, that little loafer!"

"He was standin' talkin' to that man over at the table with Miss Goosie. He was plumb mortified and ashamed."

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 "How do you know it was because you're a jerry?"

"I asked that Angus boy. He was insulted, too. He said a jerry didn't have any business hornin' in amongst railroad men."

"It appears that we're both social outcasts, then, Tom. They kid me because I fell from book-agent to biscuit-shooter, and it seems like a comical sort of one, at that. They guy me till I feel like breaking dishes on them sometimes, especially Ford Langley. He seems to have a diabolical sort of pleasure in turning the laugh against a poor workin' girl."

Louise laughed, but it was only a pretense, as Tom Laylander must have been very stupid, indeed, if he had not seen.

"I'll speak to the scoundrel," he said, the fire of indignation in his eyes.

Louise touched his hand again, in that correcting, restraining, and yet assuring manner that was almost a caress.

"Please don't—he isn't worth it. Let them laugh, there's nothing else in life for them; they can't think. Who knows but you and I may have our own private little laugh one of these days? Maybe we'll not always be biscuit-shooters and jerries."

"Yes, you'll rise up and pass on," Tom said in his quaint, soft way of speaking; "I can see it in the cards you will. But for me I can't see anything more than a trampled trail, crisscrossed till it makes my eyes ache to try to read it."

Louise looked across the little table into his face,

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 startled, alert, a question, or rather an appeal, in her concentrated attention. Another man had appeared for a moment from behind the ingenuous simplicity of this Texas cowboy. He had spoken and stepped back again, leaving the curtain that masked him scarcely agitated to show that he had passed. Tom was looking out of the window, his thin whitish eyebrows drawn, making little wrinkles run across his narrow, combative forehead from the bridge of his nose.

"Trampled trails," she repeated thoughtfully. "But they're broader when they're trampled, Tom, and easier to follow along."

"I mean when a lot of people have got the start over you and gone ahead," he explained. "They trample out the tracks of the thing you're tryin' to overtake and throw your rope on, mixin' it up so you can't tell whether you're on the right road or a blind one that spreads out to open range and nowhere in the end. That's what bothers a man, ma'am—Miss Louise."

"What have you been following, Tom, that you've lost in this crisscrossed road?"

Tom turned from the window, put down the knife that he had been holding, blade pointing upward, in his big freckled hand. He met her inquiring, perplexed eyes with a look of leaping eagerness in his own.

"I started out to make a man of myself, Miss Louise. I wanted to get an education in my head and turn out something better than a cowman down among the postoaks on the Brazos. Circumstances, Miss Louise, jetked the rope out of my hand. The animal I thought

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 I was about to throw and brand loped off and left me gappin' after it like a fool. I don't guess I'll ever overtake it any more."

"How long were you in the university, Tom?"

"I left in the middle of my junior year, Miss Louise. But how did you know? The brand must be so dim on me by now it'd take a spyglass to see it."

"Not so dim," she said. "Do you plan to go back?"

"No, I'll turn my face elsewhere, Miss Louise. I'll go on tryin' to pick up something on the start I've got while I'm waitin' for the road to run a little plainer under my feet."

"But you could go back, Tom."

"Ma'am?" said Tom, the cowboy in complete possession again, staring into her animated face with bewildered eyes.

"When you sell you cattle, I mean."

"When I sell 'em, ma'am? I ain't even got 'em to sell."

"You will have them; you're bound to beat that old thief."

"My lawyer says we'll beat him. He says the note Withers holds over me was outlawed in this state five years ago, if it never was paid. But I tell you, Miss Louise, if my father ever owed that man ten thousand dollars that long ago, it was paid."

"He ought to have been careful to get his note back," she said.

"They were awful careless about such little things in those days, Miss Louise."

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 "Little things! It seems to me a lot of money to loan on nothing but an unsecured note, as Withers says this one was."

"No, not so very much. In the old days when cattlemen were makin' money that wasn't any more to my father than ten dollars would be to one of these self-admirin' railroad men. They just handed such little sums around among themselves without a line of writin' most of the time. That was only small change in the days range cattle paid."

"It was a careless way to handle small change, anyhow."

"Yes, it does seem so," Tom admitted gloomily. "Withers says my father borrowed it when he had a herd up here on Kansas grass a long time ago. I never heard about it if he did. I've wrote to mother to search the old books. It'll be down there if father ever borrowed money from Withers and made his note, for he was a careful man about writin' down his records. I didn't tell mother I'd been attached; I just said Colonel Withers had put in a claim."

"That was better than the whole truth, I think. Have you seen Withers since that—since he put the attachment on your herd?"

"I haven't had the pleasure of meetin' him," said Tom, with peculiar stress.

"I saw him here in town swelling around with two guns on today. He had a gang with him, four or five limber-jims, as Mrs. Cowgill calls them. They trailed after him wherever he went, like a lot of dogs."

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presenting this volume of Christian Theology to the public, it may be necessary that the author should make some prefatory remarks, both in regard to the history of its origin, and to the distinctive character of the work itself.

There is perhaps no system of divinity extant which possesses more real merit than "Watson's Theological Institutes." As a body of purely evangelical theology, both theoretic and practical, it is nowhere surpassed; and in regard to its polemic character, for the clearness of its statements, the candor with which conflicting sentiments are considered, the fairness of its arguments, and the force of its logical conclusions, it has no equal. Its worth has been acknowledged by divine of various denominations both in Europe and America; and wherever it is known it cannot fail to reflect credit upon its able author, and to be regarded as the workings of a master-mind.

But notwithstanding its numerous excellencies, and its perfect adaption to the mature theologian, it is not well suited to the wants of those who are merely commencing their theological course. The very style in which the work is written is quite too labored for that of a text-book on any subject. Many of its sentences are so long and complicated, that in order to gather their meaning the most rigid attention is required. This not only diminishes the pleasure of study, but prevents, in a great measure, that deep and lasting impression on the memory which the subject would otherwise produce. A considerable portion of the work consists in quotations from various authors. By this means the uniformity of its style is frequently interrupted; and as many of these quotations are from books of comparatively ancient date, the style is occasionally somewhat antiquated. Moreover, as the opinions of different authors are frequently brought to bear upon the same point of doctrine, there is often an uncalled for and wearisome repetition of the


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 "I'm not astonished to hear of it," said Tom.

"Tom," her hand on his again in that impulsive, open and ingenuous way of arresting attention and holding it, "I can't ask you to keep out of his way, I'm not going to ask you to dodge him. But don't hunt him up, Tom, please don't hunt him up. If you see him here in town some evening spreading it around that way, just let him strut—don't rush out and begin to shoot."

"I'd like to do most anything to please you, Miss Louise," said Tom, his face very red, as if what she had asked of him made him ashamed.

"Withers will try to provoke you to make the first break, the way you did before. Don't you see his scheme? They say it's his old trick, to have the slim excuse of defending his life. It puts the law on his side, technically, as the lawyers say. What I mean is, let him start it next time. Let him come to you, don't you go to him."

"Circumstances, I expect, would have to control my actions, Miss Louise. I see the point of your argument, and I'll try to keep it in my mind. I'd rather not have any ruction with him till after the law disposes of my case."

"It would be much better, it would be so much more in your favor. And remember, if you do meet him, let him make the first break. You'd just as well have the law on your side as his."

"That's mighty good advice, and I'll do my best to follow after it, Miss Louise."

So they sat over their supper and talked, those two

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 In the preceding investigations, we have followed the method of Maclaurin for points situated in the surface of a spheroid, or within the solid. This method has always been justly admired; but neither its inventor, nor, as far as we know, any other Geometer, has applied it, excepting to spheroids of revolution; and it is here, for the first time, extended to ellipsoids. In regard to points without the surface, we have employed the method first given by Mr Ivory, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1809. The combination of these two methods has enabled us to derive the attractions of an ellipsoid on a point placed anywhere, from the attractions at the poles. Thus, this extremely complicated problem has, by geometrical reasoning of no great difficulty, been reduced to the investigation of the polar attractions, which are the only cases that require a direct computation.

34. Of the attractions of spheroids composed of elliptical shells that vary in their densities and figures according to any law.

When a spheroid is composed of concentric elliptical shells of variable density and figure, we may consider every shell as the difference of two homogeneous spheroids of the same density with the shells, and having their surfaces coinciding with the surfaces of the shell. The attractions of the spheroids being computed by the preceding methods, their difference will be equal to the attractions of the shell; and the integral obtained by summing the attractions of all the shells, will give the attractions of the heterogeneous spheroid. This case, therefore, gives rise to no new difficulties, except what are purely mathematical, and depend upon the law, according to which, the densities and figures of the shells are supposed to vary.

ATTRACTION OF MOUNTAINS. See , in the Encyclopædia, and.  ATWOOD, an Author celebrated for the accuracy of his mathematical and mechanical investigations, and considered as particularly happy in the clearness of his explanations, and the elegance of his experimental illustrations, was born in the early part of the year 1746. He was educated at Westminster school, where he was admitted in 1759. Six years afterwards he was elected off to Trinity College, Cambridge. He took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1769, with the rank of third wrangler, Dr Parkinson, of Christ’s College, being senior of the year. This distinction was amply sufficient to give him a claim to further advancement in his own College, on the list of which he stood foremost of his contemporaries; and, in due time, he obtained a fellowship, and was afterwards one of the tutors of the College. He became Master of Arts in 1772; and, in 1776, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

The higher branches of the Mathematics had, at this period, been making some important advances at Cambridge, under the auspices of Dr Waring, and many of the younger members of the University became diligent labourers in this extensive field. Mr Atwood chose, for his peculiar department, the illustration of mechanical and experimental philosophy, by elementary investigations and ocular demonstrations of their fundamental truths. He delivered, for several successive years, a course of lectures in the Observatory of Trinity College, which were very generally attended, and greatly admired. In the year 1784, some circumstances occurred which made it desirable for him to discontinue his residence at Cambridge; and soon afterwards Mr Pitt, who had become acquainted with his merits by attending his lectures, bestowed on him a patent office, which required but little of his attendance, in order to have a claim on the employment of his mathematical abilities in a variety of financial calculations, to which he continued to devote a considerable portion of his time and attention throughout the remainder of his life.

The following, we believe, is a correct list of Mr Atwood’s publications:

1. A Description of Experiments to illustrate a Course of Lectures. 8vo. About 1775, or 1776.

2. This work was reprinted with additions, under the title of An Analysis of a Course of Lectures on the Principles of Natural Philosophy. 8vo. Cambr. 1784.

3. A General Theory for the Mensuration of the Angle subtended by two objects, of which one is observed by Rays after two Rejections from plane Surfaces, and the other by Rays coming directly to the Spectator’s Eye. Phil. Trans. 1781, p. 395.

4. A Treatise on the Rectilinear Motion and Rotation of Bodies, with a Description of Original Experiments relative to the Subject. 8vo. Cambr. 1784.

5. Investigations founded on the Theory of Motion, for determining the Times af Vibration of Watch Balances. Phil. Trans. 1794, p. 119.

6. The Construction and Analysts of Geometrical Propositions, determining the positions assumed by homogeneal bodies, which float freely, and at rest, on a fluid’s surface; also Determining the Stability of Ships, and of other Floating Bodies. Phil. Trans. 1796, p. 46.

7. A Disquisition on the Stability of Ships. Phil. Trans. 1798, p. 201.

8. A Review of the Statutes and Ordinances of Assize, which have been established in England from the 4th year of King John, 1202, to the 37th of his present Majesty. 4to, Lond. 1801.

9. A Dissertation on the Construction and Properties of Arches. 4to, Lond. 1801.

10. A Supplement to a Tract entitled a Treatise on the Construction and Properties of Arches, published Rh


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 inferiors among the railroad aristocracy, jokes, both of them, to the hogheads and shacks and clinker-pullers, mainly because they were people who had been up and had come down. Their sympathies enveloped them like a fog, drawing them together in an unworded compact such as grows between the hearts of youth sometimes, to endure longer than solemn treaties of nations engrossed on parchment and set with imposing seals.

Bill Connor, sitting beside Goosie, easy in that proprietary feeling of a man who knows his situation is secure, lit a cigar and flipped the match contemptuously toward the table where the jerry and the biscuit-shooter sat.

"Looks like she's took a kid to raise," he said.

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RRIN SMITH gave Tom a little fatherly advice that night on the proper costume and deportment of a jerry. As a consequence of it, Tom appeared next day clad in blue overalls and brogans. When the gang arrived at the place where the day's work was to be done, Tom left his gun on the handcar with the jerries' dinner pails. Smith said he had no objection to any of his men wearing guns coming and going to work, but he didn't want them encumbered by weapons out on the track. A man's enemies were not likely to seek him there, in the presence of so much company, said Smith.

Tom accepted the boss's view of the case cheerfully. There was not much of a Texas look about him that day, except his old dingy-white Stetson, which bobbed around among the jerries' miscellaneous headgear as prominently as a white duck in a flock of gray ones. Mike Quinn, Tom's working partner, wore a narrowbrimmed little dicer, with holes cut in the sides of it to let the air in to his brain, he said. He advised Tom gravely to lay aside that fine costly sombrero for festive

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 occasions, and get himself one that would not represent such a big investment, or be so subject to damage from contact with black oil and the hard knocks of a trackman's life.

Tom was respectful toward Mike Quinn and his advice, as he was toward all suggestions, serious and jocose, offered by his fellow toilers. This readiness to listen, his polite bearing and soft speech, quickly made a way for Tom where a flippant smart fellow would have found it hard going. The gang adopted him, very much in the way that a household adopts a strange animal, and took a vast pride in the distinction of having the only cowboy jerry that ever was known.

The jerries were proud of Tom's refined and deferential manners, at least refined in comparison with any manners they came in daily contact with; proud of the pistol that he wore to and from work and hung on the lever of the handcar; proud of his big sombrero, which he retained against all argument to get him out of it at first. After a week they would have felt hurt and affronted if Tom had appeared in any other hat.

Section gangs in those times were made up mainly of old-timers who had followed the steel from the Lackawanna to the Santa Fé, grizzled men with thick arms and mighty chests, "good dhrinkin' men" as they described themselves with pride. Nearly all of them were Irish, who had come to America young and stepped from the ship to the ties. They were a craft to themselves, as distinctive as sailors, with a speech full of terms applying to their trade, mystifying and foreign

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 to the ears of the uninitiated. A careless, spendthrift, hardy set of rovers, veterans of the army that pushed the rails across desert and mountains, not insensible of the romance of their past, or the sacrifice of their service to their kind.

They are gone, long ago. The last old jerry is dragging out his slow dim years in some Little Sisters' home, mumbling of the days that were worth a man's while to live, when he was lead spiker on the Pas-i-fic back in the times of Jay Gould. But there were plenty of them to man the handcars of the middle-western sections in the time when Tom Laylander came to serve on the section at McPacken.

They were single men, with old home ties broken long ago and forgotten, many of them illiterate, signing their pay checks with a mark, so accustomed to hardship that the word scarcely had any meaning to them. There was nothing they had that a man in distress could not have for the asking, and nothing they wanted when out of a job and "starvin' wit' th' hoonger" that somebody did not appear at length to supply. What came in by this hand went out through that, with never a thought for winter, when the gangs were cut, nothing put by for the evil day of old age. They always looked forward to the "Nittle Sisters", as they called them, to take care of them when they could no longer handle shovel, tamping-pick and bar.

Few of them ever rose to be bosses, or more than straw-bosses, at the best, owing to their illiteracy. They never learned any more about railroad building

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 and maintenance than the routine of their daily toil, nor cared to learn. They were land sailors who had learned the ropes; it was not for them to be captains, and they knew it very well.

Once in a while there was one to be met like Mike Quinn. Mike was a reading man, although as good a drinkin' man as ever breasted the bar. He could discourse about the Pyramids and the Missouri River; about Napoleon and Brigham Young. He followed politics, and read the prize-fight news to the jerries under the cottonwood trees at Mrs. Ryan's boarding house beside the track. It took a crafty man at an argument to get ahead of Mike, who would come around with unexpected quips and turns, sharper than Plato ever was in his life.

Trainmen were greatly amused by the sight of Tom Laylander in his big hat, humping over a tamping-pick; infinitely diverted by his pistol swinging on the handcar lever at the side of the track. They called him the "cow jerry"; the news of his presence on the section at McPacken went up and down the line.

Firemen stood in the cab doors to look at him as they passed, some of them making facetious gestures of drawing a gun or swinging a rope. Brakemen on the tops of freight trains varied these, to Tom, questionably comical antics, by whooping, and prancing around in imitation of a bronco.

All of these cracks at him on the part of the intellectuals, taken in addition to the general run of mockery and derision thrown at the jerries in passing, began to

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4 same ideas; and sometimes the introduction of matter which has no direct connection with the subject under discussion.

For many years the author entertained the opinion, that by a judicious abridgment of the "Institutes" these defects might be remedied; and that by this means a concise and simple theological text-book might be furnished, which would possess all the intrinsic value of the original, and at the same time conduct students to their desired acquisition by a shorter and easier path. Finding, however, after waiting long, and conversing with many upon the subject, that no one was willing to undertake the task, he finally commenced it himself; and, as his time and ability would allow, prosecuted it to its conclusion.

But at this point a new question arose. It is known by all that there are many topics of vast importance to the students of theology which are not at all discussed in the "Institutes." It became evident, therefore, that a mere abridgment of Watson, however well executed, would not fully meet the present wants of the Church. It was this fact, together with corresponding suggestions from an official source, which led to the preparation of the following work in its present form.

And now, in regard to the character of the work itself, it is only necessary to say that it has for its basis an abridgment of "Watson's Theological Institutes," which the author has given in his own style, and to which is added a considerable amount of original matter, for the purpose of completing the system; that to this is prefixed a brief Introduction to the Study of Theology, principally derived from the theological writings of Knapp, Dick, and Horne; and that the whole is presented in a new and strictly systematic form, assuming, to a very good extent, as every candid reader will allow, the character of originality.

As to the design of the author, it was to furnish a clear and comprehensive outline of scriptural theology, which, though especially intended for the benefit of those who are preparing for the Christian ministry, should at the same time be adapted to the wants of all classes of readers, from the aged theologian to the Sabbath-school scholar. How far he has succeeded in the accomplishment of this purpose others must judge. He knows that his work is imperfect, and will need the indulgence of a generous public. But he has done what he could; and now his earnest prayer is, that God may accept the humble offering, and render it subservient to the enlargement and edification of his Church: "To whom be glory for every and ever. Amen!"


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 nettle Tom after a while. All railroaders were alike to him, these on the trains only fellow-servants of the same master served by the section men. It seemed small business to Tom, this imitating the pumping of a handcar, driving spikes, lining track, which so amused brakemen and firemen. Conductors and engineers, to their everlasting credit and respect in Tom Laylander's memory, never stooped to these mocking frivolities.

Where it hit Tom was its intentional insult and malignancy, or perhaps insolent exultation over men placed by chance or misfortune, or choice, and proud enough in their selection, in this lowly way of earning their daily chuck. He resented this attitude strongly, often speaking his mind on it to Mike Quinn, who as regularly came forward with his philosophy to calm Tom's indignation.

"Consither the source," said Mike, "as the man said whin the jackass kicked him, and let it pass."

It took all of Mike's philosophy, as well as such of his own as he could command, to hold Tom from pitching a rock at Windy Moore when he went by, prancing and making derisive pantomime, leaning over and shouting "Cow jerry! Ya-a-a! Ya-a-a!"

This happened every second day when Windy passed. Windy was not a very high man in the aristocracy of trainmen, being nothing more than brakeman on the local freight, which was the very beginning, in fact, of the long and bumpy road to the conductor's seat in the cupola of a caboose. Windy had a long way to go before arriving among the great, but he was ages in

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 the evolution of labor above the lowly state of section hand.

"Let ye stand on your dignity, lad, and lave 'em pass," Mike advised. "If the poor crathurs get any pleasure out of their prancin' and dancin' and posthurin' around, let 'em have it. They're a lot of poor ignorant fellys that never read a book of histhory in their lives. Savages, they are, lad. The nagur savages in the wilds of Africa make faces at strangers, and prance and mock and posthure in insultin' capers, the same as these poor brakeys do, tryin' to provoke the first blow.

"These boxcyar lads think they're the important men in railroadin'. They are not. Take away the section boss and his gang for tin days and lave the thrack go: where would these fine lads land? In the ditch, with the freight cyars on top of them, and not one among the lot with sinse enough in the head of 'im to dhrive a spike.

"It's the lads on the thrack that count in railroadin'; nobody else. Take you and me, spikin' these ties. What would happen if we spread the rails, or dhrawed 'em, three or four inches out o' gauge aither way? Where would Windy Moore be when the ingin sthrook the spot? Sailin' through the wind like a mateor, rammin' the head iv 'im in the ditch. Let 'em go, I tell ye, lad; let 'em pass."

This argument, aside from Mike's prejudice in favor of his own calling, had considerable truth to enforce it, Tom realized, but it did not excuse the offense nor palliate the sting. He studied the worst offenders,

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 Windy Moore among them, marking each man well. As the days passed they became familiar figures, both on the road and in the streets of McPacken. He waited for them to try some of their funny business with him when they stood man to man on the ground.

This never happened. While the cow jerry was an object of great entertainment and ribald mockery to brakemen and firemen going by at thirty or fifty miles an hour, he was no funnier than any other man when met on the streets in town. Trainmen passed him there without a word or wink, as oblivious to his presence on earth, it appeared, as one of the myriad leaves on Mrs. Cowgill's cottonwood trees. If there was no spoken insult in this passing him over as if he did not exist, there was no aggression. Tom was satisfied to have it that way in town; he would have been happy and comfortable if they would have given him the same peace out on the road.

Let them have their joke, said Tom, even at his expense, though what there was so diverting and comical in the aspect of a man who had ridden the range all his life coming down to railroading, he could not see. For it was a come-down on his part; it would have been just as much of a come-down to Laylander shovelling coal into an engine, or trotting the tops of boxcars, as tamping ties on the section. Railroading was all railroading to him, one job as respectable as another, all of it far below the freedom and independence of the range.

It was a comfort to Tom that he was not to be a regular railroader, that he was using the job as a tem-

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 porary bridge to cross the few weeks which lay between him and the recovery of his cattle. It might be well, he considered, if he could enter into the spirit of the thing with the trainmen, and show them that he, also, looked on his present occupation as a joke.

This notion pleased him. He went grinning around at his work while he turned over certain schemes for expressing his appreciation of their humorous banter to the passing brakemen, Windy Moore in particular. The more he thought of it the better it pleased him. Mike Quinn asked him if he had found a purse.

Tom's opportunity to put his plan of responsive appreciation into practice came when he had been a little more than a month on the gang. The jerries were going home from their day's work of picking up joints when overtaken by the local freight, which came pounding toward McPacken with a long train of empties gathered at way stations during the day. The local was late, the engineer in a great sweat to make it in to McPacken, out of humor with the dispatcher for laying him out everywhere for the numerous stock extras which had kept the rails hot that day.

This thing of overtaking a handcar and forcing the jerries to look lively for a spot to drag it off; their excited flinging of shovels and bars to lighten it if they had time; their shouts and agile jumping about, always amused trainmen as no other bit of comedy in the day's work. There were always two or three old jerries in every gang who went to pieces in a pinch of that kind, invoking the protection of the saints, laying hold of

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 coats, dinner pails, tools; flinging them without regard of direction, the assistance or impediment of the urgent work in hand.

Orrin Smith's crew was no exception in this regard. There were three handcar-loads of terriers in his gang, proceeding that evening in close order toward the tool house, most of them smoking comfortably, pumping with leisurely stroke, standing so thick that few could get more than one hand on the levers.

Smith was riding on the first car, watching back for the local, which he knew had not passed and was hours late. It caught them on a straight piece of track, with plenty of time to get the cars off, but the nervous old-timers strewed the right-of-way with shovels, picks and dinner buckets, flinging them as if they jettisoned the cargo of a floundering ship.

This scene of excitement ahead of them, the bright pails flashing, covers flying off, coats sailing with arms outspread, gave a seasoning to the humor of the situation for the trainmen which even the crusty engineer unfixed his face to enjoy. The fireman came to the right-hand side of the cab—the jerries were going off the rails on that side—where he stood grinning. As the engine flashed by he made the sign which commonly passed in such cases: smashing his right fist into his left palm, spreading his hands with an upward motion of dispersion, complete obliteration, illustrative of a burst rocket, nothing left but the smoke. That's what's going to happen to this gang of jerries one of these

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 days. Smart as you are, we'll get you yet. So this sign of collision and dismemberment meant.

Windy Moore was standing on top of a boxcar about midway of the long train, leaning against the wind, his loose overalls flagging around his skinny legs. As he approached the jerries, scattered around their hastily removed handcars, picking up their coats, looking for pipes that had been lost in the wild throwing off, Windy came over to the edge of the car roof, where he leaned, derision wide in his mocking face.

Tom Laylander was standing by, smoking a cigarette. He was in a glow of quickened blood, the little flurry having been quite to his liking, a welcome break in the monotony of a long and grinding day. His pistol was in its scuffed holster against his leg, his big hat threw a slantwise shadow across his face. Jerrying wouldn't be a bad job at all if there was more of this kind of stuff in it, he thought. And there came Windy Moore across his moment of pleasure, leaning out to fling his taunt and jeer.

"Cow jerry! Ya-a-a!" yelled Windy Moore, singling Tom out for his malicious witticism, as always.

Windy passed in a roar and swirl of dust, his long-drawn ya-a-a-a streaming after him as seeds fly out of a milkweed pod when it is held to the wind. Tom pulled out his gun between puffs on his little cigarette and threw a shot over the top of Windy Moore's boxcar, plugging another one after it so fast it followed the same hole through the air.

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 The bullets must have whispered something new to Windy Moore, something that he could hear above the roar and jangle of the loose-jointed freight. He stooped and dodged, fanning the wind as if fighting a sudden attack of hornets, looking all the time for some place to go. There never was a little brakeman on that division with such urgent business behind him as Windy Moore had for the next few seconds, Tom Laylander standing back at the other end of the quick-stretching distance, emptying his gun over the boxcar that Windy rode.

The train was going fast, but not fast enough for Windy. He was near the end of the car, but it was the wrong end, the ladder was on the side of the shooting cow jerry. Windy even outran the train when he broke for the forward end of the boxcar, where he grabbed the top bracket of the ladder and swung himself to safety on the opposite side.

"Stop shootin' at that man!" Orrin Smith yelled, his face white in the fear for his job that rushed over him at sight of this act of lese majestie.

The caboose jerked by, leaving the jerries in sudden silence.

"What do you mean shootin' at that man?" Smith demanded, his order to hit the grit and look for another job plain to his excited eyes.

"I wasn't shootin' at him," Tom corrected his boss, grinning in the pleasure of recalling Windy Moore fanning the bullets away from his ears. "I was only shootin' to-wards him."

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 "Dang the difference, dang the difference!" said Smith, who was a notably temperate man.

"When you shoot at a man you hit him," Tom explained. "That's the difference, Mr. Smith."

Smith was a man with thick, sloping shoulders, like a bottle. His voice was in the front of his mouth; his words came out with a blab, like the bleat of a sheep.

"They'll report it, they'll report it the minute they hit town! Well, git them cars on—git them cars on!"

Smith looked mighty glum the rest of the way to the tool house, sitting on the water keg with his foot beside the brake. The jerries were silent, throwing a ham into the little old handcar with unusual vigor. They looked at Tom with slanting glances, rolling their eyes, keeping their faces straight ahead. They acted like a crowd of boys accessory to a disastrous prank by one of their number, anxious to prove by their present conduct that they were in no manner implicated nor to blame.

Smith brought the handcar to a stop before the tool house door. Foot on the brake he looked up with reproachful severity at Tom, who was swinging to the ground.

"You're fired," said Smith.

"I'm sorry if I hurt your feelin's, Mr. Smith," Tom said, rather jolted by this unexpected ending of what he had meant to be nothing more than a pleasant prank.

"You and your dang gun, shootin' around here!"

"Yes sir," said Tom, feeling decidedly foolish.

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 "I'll give you your time this evenin'. I'm through with gun-toters on my section."

That appeared to close the matter; Tom having no word to add. He went to the Cottonwood Hotel humiliated and downcast, wondering why it was so hard for some people to see through a harmless little joke.

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ONTRARY to Orrin Smith's fearful forebodings, Windy Moore did not make a report of the cow jerry's pleasant little diversion. If it had been left to Windy to give the incident publicity, nobody ever would have heard of it. But Windy's conductor was sitting with his head out of the caboose cupola to get the breeze when the local passed the overhauled jerries that evening. His appreciation of Windy's antics while fanning the bullets away from his ears with open hand was so keen that he could see no seriousness in the case at all. Within half an hour after the local's arrival, all the railroaders in McPacken had heard the story, and great was the roar of mirth at Windy Moore's expense.

For all that, Tom was fired. Smith was not running chances on getting called down by the roadmaster for having a gun-slinging wild fellow like that in his peaceful gang of terriers. Smith stopped at the hotel desk to write Tom's time check, his indignation and resentment, his severity and censure increasing as his rum-

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 bling mind turned the disturbing speculation of his own peril.

It was a terrifying thought to Smith that he might lose his fine job on account of a wild Texas boy who didn't know any better than to run the risk of damaging company property with his fool gun, even though he may not have tried to hit Windy Moore. Suppose he'd shot a hole in the side of that boxcar!

Tom's momentary exuberance, the thrill that had quickened him like old times, over seeing Windy Moore jump for the ladder, had died away to a cold and hopeless feeling when he corralled courage enough at last to go down to supper. He was depressed and ashamed; he could not have felt much worse if Windy Moore had pitched off into the ditch with a bullet through his neck.

To make the situation worse, several railroaders were at the long table. Somebody among them started clapping his hands when Tom appeared; the others took it up, leaning back in unctuous repletion, pie crumbs around their gills, as if the hero in the melodrama had arrived with the money to pay off the old farmer's mortgage.

Tom was as red as if fury had set its torch to his fur. He could not have suffered a more distressing pang if he had lost a leg. Shame hits some modest people that way, with a torture that is harder to bear than fire. But the railroaders were more than half in earnest, as Tom learned when several came to his table presently, clapped him on the back, shook hands with him and had their roaring laugh at this Texas joke,

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 the humor of which seemed to grow as they carried it around.

They knew that Smith had discharged Tom. He was no longer a jerry, there was no degradation in the touch of his calloused hand. He had been only a sort of experimental jerry, anyway, never a serious one growing a hump on his back over a tamping-pick. Ford: Langley lingered a little after the others. He approached Tom's table picking his teeth.

"Hang around town till pay-day, kid," he advised, "and I'll see what I can do for you. Nearly always somebody drops out after pay-day."

Tom thanked him with so much gratitude and sincerity in his soft, slow-dragging voice that the roundhouse foreman went away swelled up with a feeling of magnanimity, just as if he had stooped and lifted some wreck of a jerry out of the ditch and taken him into the saloon and given him a drink.

Tom thought it would be a big and sudden jump for him if he intended to follow railroading, for a job in the roundhouse led to fireman, and fireman to engineer. In those days of much road building and quick promotion, the road from wiper to engineer was not a long one. Engineer was the top of consequence in McPacken. It combined dignity, affluence, high honor. An engineer could take the pick of anything in that town. It was the same in every little railroad center throughout the west in those days.

Louise waited until the congratulatory press had moved on, then approached Tom for his supper order.

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 When she came from the kitchen with his order she brought her own supper also, the custom of taking this meal with the cow jerry being so well established that both looked upon it as a fixed event.

Tom told Louise about losing his job, and the reason for it, which she knew already. He mentioned the prospect leading to the right side of a locomotive cab which opened before him in Langley's friendly offer. Louise was not impressed by the magnificent future of this prospect. She sniffed; she tossed her head with lofty disdain.

"I'd rather see you a section boss than an engineer," she declared. "A man gets to be a hoghead, and there he stops; his ambition is fulfilled when he gets a passenger run, with all the silly girls along the line waving at him as he goes by."

"I suppose a man's got to stop somewhere, though," Tom ventured.

"But not hanging out of a cab window. There are not any traditions around here of engineers who rose to be presidents of railroads, or anything else. Once an engineer, always an engineer."

"Most men are satisfied when they hit a good thing, Louise. I think that accounts for engineers stayin' engineers, instead of any lack of ambition. They looked to me like a mighty fine class of men, seein' them ride past me while I was laborin' on the section. They never had a word of ridicule for us jerries."

"So much to their credit, anyway," she said. "Do

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 you think you'll take the job if Ford Langley offers you one?"

"It'll be two weeks till pay-day; my case it'll come up in court and be settled befdre then. I can decide on the job after I know where I'm at. Court opens in five days from now. My lawyer says he'll bring my case to a hearin' not later than the second day."

"You can rest up till the trial, and not bother about a job. From what I hear these lily-handed aristocrats of railroad society say, section work must be a terrible strain on a man's physical and moral forces."

"It was hard at first, cruel hard," said Tom, reflectively. "But I got toughened to it so I didn't mind. If it wasn't for the remarks they pass on a man, jerryin' wouldn't be such a bad job at all."

"If you win your case, you'll sell your cattle in the fall and go back to Texas."

"I've always been aimin' to, Louise, till around here lately. I've been considerin' and plannin' on stayin' up here in the north if I can get something under my feet."

"It's bound to come right," she cheered him. "One way or another you'll come into your own again."

"I don't see how the judge can go against me when he learns the facts. There ain't one word in my father's records about a loan from Withers that stands unpaid, as far as mother has been able to find, and she's made a careful search. I believe that old rascal changed some paper bearin' my father's signature and made a note out of it."

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 "I think he might do even that, he's got a look about him of acrook. But if he wins in court, what then?"

"Time will have to answer that, Louise."

"It wouldn't do a bit of good to go and shoot him up, though," she said.

"We can think of enough disagreeable things every minute, Louise, without reachin' out ahead so far after them," he reminded her, gently.

"Then I've got something to tell you that's not so disagreeable," she said, coming brightly out of the gloomy cloud that always obscured her when she talked of violence between him and Withers. "I'm going to quit my job tomorrow."

"You don't tell me?" There was consternation, rather than joy, in Tom's voice. He felt the blood creeping down, down, out of his face. "Are you goin' to leave McPacken, Miss Louise?"

"I've got Maud Kelly's place in the court house. Maud's been plugging for me strong, backed by Mrs. Cowgill, who despairs of ever seeing me catch an engineer in my present lowly situation."

"She's a calculatin' lady," said Tom. "What kind of a situation will you have in the court house, if I'll be allowed to inquire?"

"A sort of cashier, taking in money and giving out tax receipts. Maud says there is no great rush of business."

"There will be, I'll bet you. When you begin' takin' in money they'll come in from away out on the edges to pay their taxes. When do you aim to begin?"

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 "Day-after-tomorrow, just getting the run of the ropes while Maud's there, but my pay doesn't start for nearly three weeks. Maud's vacation begins Saturday; she's allowed two weeks off with pay, and she's already arranged for one of the other girls in the office to fill her job. It's the custom for one to relieve the other. So Maud and I are going to visit her brother's family, down on his ranch somewhere between here and the Nation. Maud's impatient to get down there and ride around. She's a regular cowgirl—she was brought up on a big ranch."

"She sure steps along like a fresh-air lady. I always ad-mire that girl's gait."

"She's already spoken for, Tom; your case is hopeless."

"Ma'am?" Tom's blood was hot in his cheeks. He seemed to be mentally tip-toeing away from her, in his questioning, deferential, easily frustrated way.

"She's going to marry Mr. Cook, the baggage smasher."

"You don't tell me?" in expression of wonderment far greater than the subject, or Tom's own conscience, justified. "I've seen the gentleman," he continued, beginning to grow easy again, "enterin' a blue house down by the railroad yards."

"He lives there with his mother."

"He walks like a sheriff," said Tom, "with his chin held out from him so he can see his mustache."

"I never have made a study of the gait of sheriffs," Louise said, "but I fail to discover any of the fine

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 points Maud sees in Mr. Cook, especially when he appears in the door of the baggage car as a background to a trunk."

"It's not a very exalted situation," Tom said thoughtfully, yet respectfully, remembering the humble job that was his own until that evening.

"Maybe he'll rise from baggage smasher with Maud to shove him."

"I bet he'll go clean through the top of the car," said Tom, with such warm assurance that Mr. Cook's future seemed to enlarge far beyond either the ambitions or the capabilities of a commonplace, fully satisfied man in a large brown mustache.

Louise had a trick of lifting her eyebrows and rolling up her eyes, as an elderly person does when looking over the rim of his glasses. She did this in a sly appraisement of the object under scrutiny, as if she veiled her appreciation, or perhaps her mirth. Tom was accustomed to that glance; he was always on the lookout for it, watching for the little grin that illuminated her rather lean and serious face with such a flash of humor that he felt laughter lift its wings to fly out of his mouth.

She looked at him that way now, her lips pressed in a line that trembled in the travail of a smile.

"Tom, you're the funniest kid!" she said.

"I wasn't aimin' to be," said he, feeling very boyish and immature.

"You never do—don't ever try to be. Just go on being natural and nice. You don't know how much I

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 like you that way, so different from these fresh brakeys and firemen."

Tom was so confused, but in a delightful warm confusion that seemed the scented air of paradise, that he was not equal to any sort of immediate reply.

"I'd like to see Maud marry a better man." Louise returned to her subject abruptly. "She's a good girl. By all the ratings of McPacken society she ought to have a conductor, or a fireman, at the very lowest."

"There's Pap," Tom suggested, coming to his senses slowly again. "He seems to consider himself a high premium for any lady."

"I think Pap is training right now to rush the new deputy county treasurer. You can't imagine how my prospects have brightened in this town, Tom."

"Glory is broadenin' over you like sunrise."

Their talk came back to the cattle, after a while, as it nearly always did from whatever lighter matter that might lend them a recess of relief from the vexatious problem. Tom said he had to see the roadmaster the first thing in the morning, and get his time check signed. Then he intended to hire a horse and take a ride out into the country.

"Do you know where your cattle are?" Louise inquired.

"Down somewhere between here and the Nation—you know the line is only forty miles south of McPacken. The sheriff's grazin' them on the land I engaged from that bal' faced old liar to pasture 'em on

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 this summer. I thought I'd take a look at them and see how they're fillin' out."

"It wouldn't be a bad idea," she assented, but as if she had conditions in reserve. Then her hand reached out and fell on his where it lay beside his plate, in that swift, arresting way she had of doing this. "Tom, you're not going to try to pull off anything tomorrow, are you?"

"No, Louise. I'll wait on the law like a gentleman. If it fails to give me my own, then I'll have to see what can be done."

"It will seem hopeless if the case goes against you, Tom. But I don't know; something may happen, it looks impossible that such a plain steal could be put through. When the time comes, I'm going to help you," she declared with sudden assurance, almost enthusiastic fervor. She looked up, her eyes bright. "It's too big a trick for one man."

"Why, Louise, you warm a person's heart when you talk that way!" said Tom, glowing with gratitude. "Your moral support will help me over a mighty high fence when the time comes to jump it."

"Moral support!" She discounted it for just what it would be worth against Cal Withers, and that was not the force of a sparrow's wing. "You'll need something more than moral support to get that herd back if the judge says Withers' claim is good, and I'm going to be right there to help you!"

"I couldn't fail if I had you to help me," he declared, with fervor equal to her own.

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 "Have you thought—have you decided, what you're going to do in case you lose in court, Tom?"

"Nothing has come plain to me yet, Louise. I'm like a man in a storm, waitin' to see a clearin'. It will come to me when it's needed, I expect. But whatever is to be done must wait on the law."

"Of course," she assented, gravely. "But there's one thing to remember, when you go down there to look at the cattle tomorrow, and all the time: If you meet Withers, don't start anything. If there's got to be trouble, let him begin it."

"I'll do my best to remember what you've said, Louise, now and at other times, on this subject."

"If you'll wait on Withers to pull his gun first, there'll not be any trouble," she advised him gravely. "I've been finding out a lot about him here lately."

"I'd go away around to keep from havin' open trouble with him, Louise, especially before my case comes off. A fuss might have a bad bearin' on my case."

"And after the case, if you lose it, Tom?"

"A way will be found," Tom answered, his eyebrows drawn, wrinkling his fighting forehead with determined frown.

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AP COWGILL was off his run for a few days, pending the healing of one of his feet, on which he had dropped a chunk of coal. The company doctor, no other, in fact, than the father of Angus Valorous, had been over to the Cottonwood Hotel to attend the bruised member, leaving a scent of drugs in the parlor, where Pap had submitted himself to the physician's ministrations. Pap was established in the carpet-covered spring rocker by the window, his bandaged foot on a hassock made of tomato cans, after the thrifty way of pioneer housekeepers, a piece of economy worthy of the great work that Louise Gardner had come to McPacken to put on every center table.

This hassock was covered with carpeting to match the chair, padded with cotton batting and supplied with two little ears for lifting it around. Young ladies sometimes sat on it, especially Goosie, who found it of convenient height for resting her head on Bill Connor's knee. Pap was comfortable. He enjoyed being crippled; he liked the smell of arnica and carbolated salve.

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 He sat with elbow on the window sill, waving a languid hand to his friends as they passed.

Pap looked at his watch; nine o'clock. He wished his mother or one of the girls would come along so he could send for a cigar. He was entirely able to go and get it out of the showcase himself, but it would be that much more luxurious and enjoyable to have somebody bring it. Louise, preferably. The poorest cigar in the case would taste sweet from her hand. Pap sighed.

Pap sat with watch in his hand, abstractedly turning the stem, rolling it between thumb and finger as if shaping a pill, thinking of a little house he had seen on the hillside in Argentine on his last run, with a for rent sign in the window. Handy place for a man at the end of his run, nice little home for Louise, who wasn't cut out for a biscuit-shooter, take her at her best. Pap thought her inaptitude in that art was blamable to her feet. A girl needed big feet to rush around all day that way, carrying tray loads of grub. But her feet were big enough for all the work she'd have to do when he got his engine; and that was a cinch. She'd have her hired girl and horse and buggy then; and that was a cinch.

A lot of guys would be hangin' around her when she went on that court house job; and that was a cinch. He'd rather she stayed in the dining-room, only that her health might break, but if any guy got fresh with her up there around the square he'd hear from yours truly; and that was a cinch. There'd be one advantage in her change of work; she wouldn't be around there to

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 eat supper every evening with that cow jerry. There was a guy that would have to hit the grit; he'd make that plain to the old lady. He wasn't goin' to stand for that Texas guy, moonin' around there like a soft egg; and that was a cinch.

Pap sat up with a jerk, his ear to the window screen. Sounded like somebody shooting up in the direction of the square. There! three more, as quick—. People were running; there were more shots, so fast and so many Pap could not count them. He was gasping with excitement when he kicked the hassock aside. Where in the hu-hu-hell was that overshoe!

Pap went hobbling to the front door, walking on his heel. Mrs. Cowgill had heard the shooting, and the commotion of running feet on the plank sidewalks. Goosie had heard it; Louise had heard. They came crowding to the door, Mrs. Cowgill putting her head out cautiously, her neck stretched to prodigious length, her arm blocking the door to prevent Goosie rushing out into no telling what danger.

But there was no danger near her hand. Mrs. Cowgill went to the porch, where Pap had gone already. Goosie and Louise followed; some who came running from the direction of the depot stopped there, all of them straining to see what was going on up the street where the public square cut it across with a line of, maple trees.

Nothing was to be seen but the outpouring of people, overflowing the sidewalks now, rushing toward the square. The shooting had stopped. Now there was a

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 gust of it again, as if somebody was riding away in defiance, or perhaps triumph, his victim lying stretched in the square. Louise felt her breath die away, her heart sag in sickening pause as if it never could gather momentum to carry life forward again.

Tom Laylander had gone to the bank only a few minutes before, to be there when it opened. He wanted to cash his time check, together with a little draft his mother had sent to help along until the cattle were sold. Tom had looked ready to cry when he told her about it at breakfast. Tom had met Cal Withers and his men. That was the answer to the shooting.

Louise felt it come over her coldly, compressing the warmth out of her body, the blood out of her heart. She pictured Tom lying in the dust, his hat close by, his boyish face turned up to the sun. It was such a terrible, such a poignantly cruel sketching of imagination that the actual could have been little less shocking. A sob, that was half a sharp protesting cry, escaped her utmost efforts to choke it down. With her apron around her, just as she had come from work, Louise ran toward the square.

Mrs. Cowgill and Goosie started after her, soon overtook her, and ran with her step for step, the late corners behind them drawing up with great noise over the uneven sidewalk planks. A little way beyond the Racket Store they met Windy Moore, running tight for the hotel.

"Don't stop me! I'm goin' for my gun!" Windy replied to Mrs. Cowgill's wild appeal for news.

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 In spite of his great rush, Windy did not appear unwllingunwilling [sic] to pause for a word or two. No battle that he might fight ever could give him as much pleasure as delivering a piece of news, especially when he was certain his mouth was the first to speak it.

"What's happened—what's happened?" Mrs. Cowgill pressed.

"Robbed the bank—I'm goin' for my gun!" Windy replied, his eyes big in his meddlesome face.

"Who?" they all asked together, closing around Windy, cutting off his way. Goosie grabbed a handful of the little brakeman's vest, determined to hold him until he had given them all he knew.

"Who—who robbed the bank?"

"That cow jerry, that Texas guy! Sent for his gang, cleaned out the bank, killed the city marshal and the cashier—oh, hell! Let me go and git my gun!"

"Killed the cashier and the marshal!" Mrs. Cowgill gasped.

The gathering crowd pressed around them. Goosie shook Windy in her impatience to have it all.

"Who killed them?" she demanded, shaking him as if a grain of truth hid in him somewhere that he was covering wilfully.

"That cow jerry and his gang, I tell you!"

"Who told you?" Louise inquired.

"Told me?" Windy repeated, twisting to break Goosie's hold. "I was there—they took my watch and roll—I tell you I was there!"

Goosie let him go, to stand aghast before Louise, who

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 was so shocked and stunned that even coherent thought was impossible. The press around them was so great now Windy did not attempt to go on. Those who crowded to get near him appeared to think he had been the chief actor in whatever had happened, and was coming off victorious from the field.

"Did you say they robbed the bank?" an old man inquired, hand behind his ear.

"Cleaned out every dollar," Windy replied. "I'd just drawed forty dollars, me and three or four others was in the bank, when that cow jerry come in to cash a check. That was a stall, I tell you it was a stall. While the cashier was handin' him out the money his gang rode up and cut loose at everybody in sight, tryin' to drive 'em in. Two of 'em come in the bank and lined us up face to the wall, and while one of 'em held us there the cow jerry and his pardner killed the cashier and put all the money in a sack."

"The marshal got one of 'em!" said a man, pushing in with savage satisfaction.

"But they got him," another added, breathless, panting, dashing away to spread the news.

"Are you sure Tom Laylander was there?" Louise asked, her courage returning with her resentment of the charge.

"I seen him put the money in the sack," Windy declared. There was four of 'em besides him, two held the horses and two follered him into the bank where he was puttin' up his stall. I saw that cow jerry take the guns off of his pardner the marshal killed, and hop one

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 of the horses 'n ride off with the bunch. They went off rairin' and shootin' at everybody they saw."

Louise went on, not convinced that Windy Moore had seen all the things of which he talked. She hoped to get the straight of it from somebody around the bank.

"Ain't it awful!" Mrs. Cowgill gasped. "And him such a soft-spoken man."

"There's some mistake," Louise declared.

They were obliged to stop at the corner, some distance from the bank, held back by the crowd that stood in front of that building and extended into the street.

"They're pickin' up the marshal!" Mrs. Cowgill whispered. "That's Doc Wilson, the coroner. Oh, ain't it—"

"There's another one in the wagon!" said Goosie, clutching Louise's arm. "Look at his feet—he's got on cowboy boots! Do you suppose it's the cow—it's him!"

"No," said Louise, coldly.

"They look like his spurs!" Goosie insisted, with what seemed malicious avidity.

Maud Kelly came pushing her way through the crowd like a man, nearly upsetting some of the ancient citizens who were too absorbed in the proceedings to get out of her fairway. Maud was bareheaded and excited. She came straight to Louise, perhaps not insensible, through all her own perturbation, of the pleading appeal in the girl's white face.

"It'll be all right, honey," said Maud, with futile,

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 cheerless assurance, as one speaks when condoling an irremediable loss. She put her arm around Louise and hugged her in a sort of affectionate fierceness, as if she defied somebody who had dared her to express such sympathy.

"Ain't it awful? Mr. Crowley and the marshal killed!" Mrs. Cowgill said.

"Mr. Crowley? Who said he was killed?" Maud inquired.

"We heard they shot him dead."

"There he stands, in the door," said Maud. "Honey, you'd better come on home with me."

Louise faced her with desperate courage, cool now, and controlled, as if she presented herself to the surgeon's knife for an operation that balanced life and death.

"Maud, do you know what really happened?" she asked.

"Yes, I was in the bank."

"You was!" Mrs. Cowgill exploded.

Crowley, the bank cashier, was explaining to his eager patrons the particulars of the robbery. The crowd was divided between him and the melancholy business going forward under the coroner's direction; the four women were left alone at the street corner, where they stood in the dusty roadway of the public square.

"I'd gone to the bank for some silver to make change for the day," Maud said. "Windy Moore and two or three others were there—Tom Laylander at the cash

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 ier's window. I don't know just how it happened, it was done so quick, only that two men with guns came bustin' in the bank and lined all of us but Tom Laylander up with faces to the wall. I don't know what happened next, they were shootin' things up so in front of the bank. I looked around to see if they'd killed Mr. Crowley. Two men were in his cage, throwin' everything out of the safe into a sack."

"Was one of them Tom Laylander?" Louise asked, with the breath of what seemed her last hope.

"Honey, I'm afraid it was."

"Puttin' the money in a sack! And him such an honest lookin' boy!"

"Mr. Crowley played dead, layin' flat on the floor, huggin' the wall of the cage," Maud continued, as the surgeon in this desperate case who must push on in excruciating mercy to the end. "They didn't touch him."

"Wasn't that robber holding a gun on Tom Laylander, Maud?" Louise inquired, with the slow, calm surety in her words of a lawyer who has come to the turning-point of his case.

"Honey, I couldn't see from where I stood, and I only had a glance. The one that had us lined up took a shot at me when he saw me look around."

"Took a shot at you!" Goosie exclaimed, with such appreciation that it amounted almost to delight.

"Heaven above!" Mrs. Cowgill said.

"It was just a bluff, I guess," said Maud. "It hit

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Rh dom, i.e. the ten last kings, amongst whom the kingdom of those men shall be partitioned, and upon whom the son of perdition shall come, declares that ten horns shall spring from the beast, and that another little horn shall arise in the midst of them, and that three of the former shall be rooted up before his face. He says: "And, behold, eyes were in this horn as the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things, and his look was more stout than his fellows. I was looking, and this horn made war against the saints, and prevailed against them, until the Ancient of days came and gave judgment to the saints of the most high God, and the time came, and the saints obtained the kingdom." Then, further on, in the interpretation of the vision, there was said to him: "The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall excel all other kingdoms, and devour the whole earth, and tread it down, and cut it in pieces. And its ten horns are ten kings which shall arise; and after them shall arise another, who shall surpass in evil deeds all that were before him, and shall overthrow three kings; and he shall speak words against the most high God, and wear out the saints of the most high God, and shall purpose to change times and laws; and [everything] shall be given into his hand until a time of times and a half time," that is, for three years and six months, during which time, when he comes, he shall reign over the earth. Of whom also the Apostle Paul again, speaking in the second [Epistle] to the Thessalonians, and at the same time proclaiming the cause of his advent, thus says: "And then shall the wicked one be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the spirit of His mouth, and destroy by the presence of His coming; whose coming [i.e. the wicked one's] is after the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and portents of lies, and with all deceivableness of wickedness for those who perish; because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And therefore God will send them the working of error, that they may believe a lie; that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but gave consent to iniquity."


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 the wall a foot or two over my head—my hair's all full of plaster."

She shook her fair crimped hair, leaning over to allow the particles of lime to shower down, and laughed a little, although there was no more mirth in the sound than there was in Louise Gardner's downcast heart that moment.

"Do the bank people believe Tom Laylander had a hand in it?" Louise inquired.

"Mr. Crowley thinks it was arranged by somebody on the spot," Maud replied, her head turned, not able to bear the pain her disclosure brought into her friend's strained face.

"And him such a soft-spoken, mild young man!" Mrs. Cowgill said, unable to fit Tom Laylander in the part of bank robber, let circumstances brand him as they might.

"How much money did he take?" Goosie asked.

"I didn't hear," Maud replied, distantly.

"This shows banks ain't safe—I always said they wasn't safe," Mrs. Cowgill seemed to exult in the vindication of her years'-long contention. "I didn't have any money in it, and I'm glad I didn't. I'll take chances keepin' it in my own safe, any day."

"You'd better come home with me," Maud pressed kindly, taking Louise by the hand.

"Yes, go on home with Maud and lie down and rest and read a book," Mrs. Cowgill urged. "We can make out the rest of the day without you."

"Why should I take a day off, any more than any-

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 body else?" Louise inquired, affecting a cold indifference, as if the complicity of one man more or less in this affair was nothing to her. "I'm not going to shirk on you my last day."

Mrs. Cowgill looked at her curiously, not understanding her in the least. Goosie turned her back, tossing her head a little, the sound of a sniff coming out of her stubby, musical nose. That's what one got for associating with jerries, her unsympathetic attitude seemed to say.

Two little spots of color came into Louise's pale cheeks, a flash into her sorrowful, shocked eyes, lighting her face up defiantly, at this pantomime on the part of Miss Goosie. Yet Goosie's attitude was only a concrete expression of the public belief, as Louise was soon to learn. As the crowd dissolved from the square, scattering in close-talking groups, she heard the term "cow jerry" pass from lip to lip.

Tom Laylander was gone, on a horse brought there by the raiders for him, it was said. And the sheriff, a chicken-faced man with a shallow, slanting forehead and a big mustache that seemed to drag him down to anemic lankness, was gathering a posse to pursue him.

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546 light from three sources—the moon, the candle, and the fire on the hearth. They had no trouble in seeing the cat come through the open window and jump up on the bed. They had no trouble at all in seeing the great green globes of the cat's eyes as it leaned over the damsel and seemed to suck the breath of life from her. Friar Sinistrari had to hold the duke to keep him from rushing into the room. Then, with one jump, the cat disappeared through the window. When they reached the room, Susanne seemed as though touched by the hand of death. Leaving her in the care of her mother and the aged nurse, the duke ran out of the castle, followed as rapidly as possible by the old friar. A few men-at-arms joined them in their hurried walk to the bare circle. There they joined the blacksmith and the others who were waiting.

The full moon, just above the tree-tops, was like a harvest moon, yellow like an orange, round as a ball and large as a bushel basket. It seemed to rest on the top of the pines, flooding the circle with light. In the middle of the spot the white lamb baaed uneasily.

Then the woman appeared.

The duke gasped. The friar prayed. Every peasant who saw what was to be seen crossed himself, for the woman was the Damsel Susanne, but her eyes were yellow globes in the moonlight. She glided over to the lamb and struck it with her left hand. A feline cry echoed through the wood, and then, without further pause, the woman seized the lamb, bit it in the neck and started to suck the blood. Once she raised her head to listen, and her lips were red in the moonlight.

Out of the stillness came the hooting of an owl!

From every side the peasants gathered to form a complete circle, greatly afraid but determined to do the thing they had been asked to do. They carried axes and hoes and sharpened stakes, and a few had spears and swords. The circle finally was three deep with determined men.

Too late the woman realized that she was surrounded. She glided away from the dead lamb, and her face was covered with blood and hate. Several times she jumped savagely at different portions of the encircling ring only to be met by the threatening hedge of weapons. Then the friar whispered to the smith, and he shouted an order to close upon the woman.

To the duke's credit he kept silent; he had promised to keep silent and not interfere, but his face disclosed the feeling in his heart to find that this woman, this fiend from hell, was his daughter. Closer and closer the threatening ring of peasants pressed, and finally a few of the bravest jumped and bore the woman to the ground under their weight. The blacksmith had her by the throat, but not before she had drawn blood from his arm.

The friar called for the brazier of glowing charcoal. In it, white-hot, was a brand in the shape of a cross. Shaking with excitement, the old man managed to control himself long enough to say earnestly, "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost;" then he took the handle of the brand in his hands and pressed it against the skull of the woman, just above and between the eyes—pressed it with all his strength. . ..

The woman writhed beneath the weight of those above her. All the powerful strength of the smith was barely enough to hold her head to the ground. Shriek after shriek filled the air as the hot crucifix burned its way into her brain and into her soul, searing and destroying the very centers of her life.

And to the horror of all, to the

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HE McPacken Daily Gazette, a little five-column curio such as could not be found throughout the length of newspaper-plastered Kansas today, had much to tell about the raid on the bank that evening. Windy Moore was quoted at length, with embellishments of vocabulary and refinements of diction as surprising to himself as to everybody who knew him; Maud Kelly was quoted, but not to such great length, her plain statement lacking in the picturesque touches which Windy Moore knew how to lay on with artistic hand.

Cashier Crowley was given a chance to explain why he had not grabbed a gun and defended the public's money instead of playing the undignified part of a dead man in this, McPacken's greatest drama. The president of the bank made a statement bearing on the amount carried off by the robbers, which was the vital and important part of the whole story to McPacken.

The banker said the loss would run between forty and fifty thousand dollars; the exact amount would not be known for a day or two, when everything had been

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 checked. A large part of the loss was county funds. There was no insurance. Although the president did not say so, the paper made it plain that things looked father cloudy for the bank.

Forty men were out, raking the country for trace of the robbers, of whom there were believed to be five, including the one who joined them at McPacken. These searchers were spreading the news at every ranch and cow camp, their numbers increasing as they rode. The gang had an hour, or more, start of the posse at the beginning, their audacious blow had so completely stunned and disorganized the town.

While the Gazette was loud in praise of the sheriff's valor and competency, it was low in its hope of results. The robbers had headed south, making for No Man's Land, as the panhandle of what was then the Indian Territory was called. For many years neither territorial nor federal jurisdiction had been exercised over that narrow neck of country. An outlaw who could gain the cover of No Man's Land was safe from the reach of those on the outside, no matter what his perils from more desperate refugees within.

The editor of the paper was a careful man, yet he wanted to give all the news and put it as plainly as he could within the limits of libel in case circumstances might clear up and show public report to be wrong. He did not mention Tom Laylander by name, there fore, but referred to him as "a young Texas cowman who has been around here the past four or five weeks, lately employed on the section as a common laborer."

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 This young man was defendant in an action to recover on a debt, brought by one of the county's most prominent citizens. It was the general public belief that this young man from Texas, resentful of this lawful reckoning demanded of him, had summoned his outlawed comrades from his notoriously vicious country, and carried out the robbery as a vindictive stroke of retaliation.

It was certain that the outlaw who had fallen by the city marshal's hand was a Texan. Letters and other evidence in his possession established that. It was also established beyond question that the young cowman before alluded to was the man who took the money from the bank's safe and threw it into a grain sack, which grain sack he carried out and flung across the saddle of one of the waiting horses, and rode away with it before him toward the fastness of No Man's Land.

All this, and much more, Louise Gardner read after she had borne her part in serving supper as usual, sitting in her little corner room with one window opening to the west, another to the south. Out of this south window she looked as night fell over the prairie, the confusion of this tragic event upon her. A soft little wind was coming up from No Man's Land, a lonesome, home-yearning touch in it, like a plea from Tom Laylander for an abeyance of judgment.

No Man's Land was not more than sixty miles away, in a southwesterly direction, lying west of the Cherokee Strip. Range horses could cover that distance in a few hours, Louise knew. She felt a little lifting of gladness

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 with the thought that Tom Laylander would have reached and crossed the border of that dark, wild country by now, only to repudiate the feeling the next moment as a traitorous acceptation of his guilt. For she said, and repeated it with obstinate disregard of all argument, proof, circumstance and reason, Tom Laylander was not a guilty man.

Perhaps he had put the money in the robbers' sack; it seemed to be unquestionable that he had gone away with them, as the paper charged. Why he had done this, what circumstance had conspired to force him to do what he had done, she could not understand. It was a shocking tangle which her frantic seeking to penetrate only confused the more. There seemed to be no beginning of reason or motive; there was no end of any sort at all.

She thought the robbers must have taken him as a hostage, unreasonable, unheard of as such hypothesis was. Windy Moore's testimony she wiped out with indignant scorn. The whole experience was like the suffocating black struggle of a dream in which a climax never is reached.

Tom had gone away with the robbers, but Tom was not one of them. How she was to establish his innocence in her own reason, how he was to make it clear against public challenge in his own time, she did not know. Only that Tom had gone toward No Man's Land with the robbers, and that he was an innocent man.

She sat looking out of the south window, the south

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 wind in her face, turning it over and over with distracting, heart-wearying, fevered persistence. He was not guilty. And her faith was the only faith that supported Tom Laylander in all McPacken that night.

The posse comitatus came straggling back next day, to be followed along toward evening by the sheriff, who looked as downcast as if he had come from a funeral. It amounted to about that, indeed, for the sheriff's hopes of re-election. It was disappointing business, being a sheriff in those times, so close to the border of No Man's Land.

Still, the sheriff had not returned without news, although it was not news of his own making. Some cowboys in his posse had found the body of a man a few miles north of the sanctuary of outlawed men. He was a stranger, unknown and unidentified by the cattlemen and herders who used in that part of the country. There was a crumpled letter from a woman in a small town of the Brazos country of Texas, entreating him to return home, or send her money. This seemed, to the sheriff, to supply about all that was wanting in his history. Some said he was one of the cowboys who had come to Kansas with Tom Laylander.

The sheriff brought the letter to McPacken; the man they buried where he lay. He had died of a bullet wound, given him by the marshal of McPacken in the battle before the bank door, it was believed.

The other members of the robber gang had not been sighted by the sheriff, who had turned back at the bor-

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 der. He did not believe in pushing his jurisdiction into the rough hills and scrubby forests of No Man's Land. Any man was as good as a sheriff there, where all men stood together to turn back the arm of the law. Other sheriffs of border counties had not been so wise as this man of McPacken. They had followed trails over the border, and they never had returned.

Two days later a cattleman rode into McPacken with the report of a dead man found a few miles over the line by some of his herders. The fellow had nothing in his possession but a dollar watch, some matches, tobacco and cigarette papers, with the exception of a rough map of McPacken and the roads leading into it. The situation of the bank on the public square was accurately marked. There were two bullet wounds in the man's breast.

The people of McPacken glowed with admiration for their city marshal, who had fallen in vain defense of their money. With the same breath they marvelled over the tenacity of life shown by these Texas men. This second bandit was found fully seventy miles from McPacken. The annals of that country did not record an instance where a man had lived to travel that far with two big bullets through his gizzards and his lights. They lived hard in Texas, and they died hard. And that was a cinch. So everybody said.

The sheriff alone expressed doubt, disbelief. He had been willing to yield the first man to the glory of the dead officer, but he would not go so far with the second one, found away across the line of No Man's

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 Land. He pulled his long mustache, gloom in his eye over the prospect of re-election, speaking his mind freely on this sowing of dead men along the raiders' trail.

In his opinion it was due to a quarrel among the thieves. That cow jerry's hand was the one scattering this woeful sowing of death, the sheriff said. He had been told, by those who had seen him in action, that he was quicker than any man's eye when it came to slinging out his gun. He had been weeding out the undesirables from his gang, likely with the ultimate purpose of killing them all, leaving no division of the stolen money necessary. It had been done before in the sheriff's time; it was a well-known Texas trick.

Louise Gardner heard all these reports and theories, for the daily paper was supporting the sheriff and picked up every word that he broadcast in the square. Her own conviction of Laylander's innocence had become settled and serene. She had arrived at a theory in the case, which she kept to herself. She did not even repose her confidence in Maud Kelly, with whom she was serving her few days of apprenticeship in the county treasurer's office.

Louise knew that the sheriff's uncharitable hypothesis was true in part. Tom Laylander's hand was the one, indeed, that was dotting the fleeing bandits' trail with dead men.

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INDY MOORE was the herald of adventure. He had been born to announce, rather than to share, the adventures of other men's lives. Added to this distinguishing favor of the gods was a sharp-nosed, gossiping, wide awake disposition for pry ing into the troubles of other people and spreading them abroad with colors retouched by a reckless imagination. Windy was always on the lookout for a sensation; for ever standing sentinel at the outpost of scandal; cease lessly applying his ear to the window-shutter in sly footed eavesdropping, his eye to the pane in despicable spying.

Following close on Tom Laylander's prank at Windy's expense, the little brakeman had been promoted from the local run to a high-ball freight. He had made his first run on the new assignment, and was back in McPacken for his layover. He had come in about breakfast-time that morning, which was the sixth day after the bank robbery in which Windy had lost his watch and roll.

Windy was so full of importance over his upward

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 step in the calendar of railroad nobility that he could not hide his new brilliance in bed very long, no matter for having been awake all the way from Argentine to McPacken the night before. Eleven o'clock saw him out of bed and shaved, and down to the front sidewalkporch with a pair of blue suspenders, blue sleeve-holders to match, enough pomatum on his sleek, short-cut black hair for two bigger men, and perfume in excess for a dozen.

His nellygee shirt, as he called it, making two words of it, like the name and initial of a lady friend, was pink-striped. Windy wore it without a necktie, the soft collar open on his classical throat, the sleeves turned back midway of his forearms, in the accepted railroad style. He was very satisfactorily arrayed, and altogether irresistible.

Banjo Gibson was not gracing a bench in front of the hotel that morning; Angus Valorous was still pounding his ear in dreams of conductorial eminence. Windy had the whole thing to himself, a little pink spot against a big green background of hotel, like a chigger on a leaf. It was a fine arrangement for the vanity of Windy Moore, suitable to his new importance.

Windy had a cigarette plastered to the corner of his sneering, disdainful mouth. What little of the world was not his a man could have put into a gunny sack and carried away. He was ready for the noon whistle, all set and waiting to pass out patronizing nods, high-signs and greetings by word of mouth to the un-

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 fortunates tied down to earth in shops and roundhouse when they came in for dinner. For dinner fell at noon in that part of Kansas then; it keeps the same cycle now.

It wanted a quarter to twelve when Pap Cowgill came limping out of the dining-room, walking with a piece of broom handle to ease the weight from his crippled foot, heading for the cigar case to help himself to the best. Pap was still in the door, his mother and the new biscuit-shooter crossing and re-crossing each other in the background like botflies circling a horse's ear, when Windy Moore came in from the porch with a slam of the screen door at his heels. Windy was white to the gills; there was a look about him of a man who had been bitten by a and was racing for the jug.

Pap was as uncertain of Windy's intentions as he was ignorant of the cause of his panic. He thought maybe Windy had swallowed something and was coming for water, or had cut himself and was running for help. Pap side-stepped to let him go by, meeting him at the foot of the stairs, which came down, indeed, just at the side of the dining-room door. Windy jumped in the same direction that Pap sidled, and then, in the foolish way that people do in such sudden and embarrassing situations, they sawed and balanced like partners in a clumsy dance.

"Let me by!" said Windy frantically. "I tell you, let me by!"

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text:
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 "What in the hu-hu-hell's a bitin' you? G-g-go by!" said Pap.

At the same time he stepped this way; Windy sprang in the same direction, nimble as a bee.

"Let me up them stairs!" Windy demanded, sweat on his face, desperation in his breath. "I tell you that cow jerry just rode by—I'm goin' after my gun!"

"The hu-hu-hell you say!" said Pap. He dropped his broom-stick cane and made for the front door in a jump.

Mrs. Cowgill appeared in the dining-room door, a wisp of hair dangling down her face, as usual when she was undergoing the labor of breaking in a new girl. Windy Moore stood with one foot advanced to the first tread of the stairs, but appeared to be in no great rush now to push his way to the top.

"Is he—did you say—"

"Just rode by," said Windy, still as white as suds. "I'm goin' after my gun!"

He went on, bounding up the stairs like a valiant and determined man. Mrs. Cowgill stood as if stricken; opened her mouth wide, her eyes wider, raising her hands as if she surrendered everything. If facial expression and manual signs spoke truly, Mrs. Cowgill did not reserve one little gasp of astonishment for future use.

She followed Pap to the door, Goosie coming running from the dining-room. A cowhand-looking man was riding up the street toward the square, sight common enough, to be sure. Whether he was Tom Lay-

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text: Page:A Complete System of Christian Theology (Wakefield, 1869, completesystemof0000wake).pdf/1