Meta Beggs saw Gordon at the same moment; and, without observation on the part of her escort, beckoned him to her. She said promptly:

“Mr. Makimmon, please take care of me while Buckley goes down by those carriages, where we saw you a little while ago, and gets his share of the refreshment there. I’m certain that dusty road made him as dry as possible.”

Buckley grinned; such frank feminine acknowledgment and solicitude for the masculine palate was rare in Greenstream. “Why, no, Miss Beggs,” he rejoined; “I’m in good shape for a while yet. I got a flask under the seat of the buggy—”

“I insist on your tending to it at once. I know just how it is with men—they have got to have that little refreshment...don’t you call it ’life preserver’? I’ll be right by the counter; if Mr. Makimmon will be so kind—”

“Well,” Buckley agreed, “a drink don’t go bad any time; the road was kind of dusty. If you insist, Miss Beggs.”

“I do! I do!” He turned and left them, striding toward the lower level. Then:

“The fool!” she exclaimed viciously; “my arm is all black and blue where he pinched it. My skin is not like the hides on these mountain girls, it tears and bruises dreadfully easy, it’s so fine. Let’s go back there,” she pointed to where, behind the platform and counter, a path was trampled through brush higher than their heads. Gordon glanced swiftly in the direction in which Buckley Simmons had vanished. “He won’t be back,” she added contemptuously, “for a half hour. He’ll stay down there and drink rotten whiskey and sputter over rotten stories.” Without further parley she proceeded in the direction indicated; and, following her, Gordon dismissed Buckley from his thoughts.

Meta Beggs wore a shirtwaist perforated like a sieve; through it he saw flimsy lace, a faded blue ribband, her gleaming shoulders. In an obscure turn of the path she stopped and faced him. “Just look,” she proclaimed, unfastening a bone button that held her cuff. She rolled her sleeve back over her arm. High up, near the soft under-turning, were visible the bluish prints of fingers. “You see,” she added; “and there are others...where I can’t show you.”

“Buck’s pretty vigorous with the girls,” he admitted; “I once dropped him down a spell for it.”

He was fascinated by her naked, shapely arm; it was slender at the wrist, and surprisingly round above, at a soft, brown shadow. He was seized by a desire to touch it, and he held her pointed elbow while he examined the bruises more minutely. “That’s bad,” he pronounced; “on that pretty skin, too.” He was confused by the close proximity of her bare flesh, the pulse in his neck beat visibly.

For a moment she stood motionless; then, with her eyes half closed, sulky, she drew away from him and rearranged her sleeve.

The brush ended on a slope where pine trees had covered the ground with a glossy mat of bronzed needles; and his companion sank to a sitting position with her back against a trunk. They were outside the influence of the camp meeting, beyond its unnatural excitation. The pine trees were black against the brilliant day; they might have been cast in iron, there was no suggestion of growth in the dun covering below; it was as seasonless where they sat as the sea; the air, faintly spiced and still, seemed to have lain unchanged through countless ages.

Meta Beggs sat motionless, with a look of inexpressible boredom on her pale countenance. Her hands, Gordon thought, were like folded buds of the mountain magnolia.

She said, unexpectedly, “You’re rich now, aren’t you, one of the richest men in the county?”

“Why I—I got some money; that is, my wife has.”

She dismissed, with an impatient gesture, the distinction. “Money is life,” she continued, with a perceptible, envious longing, “it’s freedom, all the things worth having. It makes women—it’s their leather boxes full of rings and pins and necklaces, their dresses of all-over lace, their silk and hand scalloped and embroidered underclothes; it’s their fascination and chance and power—”

“I would like to see you in some of those lace things,” he returned.

“Well, get them for me,” she answered hardily.

Utterly unprepared for this direct attack he was thoroughly disconcerted. “Why, certainly!” he replied, laboriously polite, “the next time—I’ll do it!—when I’m in Stenton again I’ll bring you a pair of silk stockings.”

“Black,” she said practically, “and size eight and a half. You will like me in black silk stockings,” she added enigmatically.

“I’ll bet,” he replied with enthusiasm. “I won’t wait to go, but send for them. You would make the dollars dance. You are different from—” he was going to say Lettice, but, instinctively, he changed it to, “the women around here. You’ve got an awful lot of ginger to you.”

“I know what I want, and I’m not afraid to pay for it. Almost everybody wants the same thing—plenty and pleasure, but they’re afraid of the price; they are afraid of it alive and when they will be dead. Women set such a store on what they call their virtue, and men tend so much to the opinion of others, that they don’t get anywhere.”

“Don’t you set anything on your—your virtue?”

“I’d make it serve me; I wouldn’t be a silly slave to it all my life. If I can get things with it that’s what I’m going to do.”

Gordon Makimmon found these potent words from such a pleasing woman as Meta Beggs. Any philosophy underlying them, any ruthless strength, escaped him entirely. They appealed solely to him as “gay,” highly suggestive. They stirred his blood into warm, heady tides of feeling. He moved over the smooth covering of pine needles, closer to her. But with an expression of petulance she rose.

“I suppose we must look for Buckley,” she observed. Gordon had completely forgotten Buckley Simmons’ presence at the camp meeting. The school-teacher, swaying slimly, led the way over the path to the plateau.

They saw Buckley Simmons at once: he was talking in an excited, angry manner to a small group of men. A gesture was made toward Gordon and his companion; Buckley turned, and his face flushed darkly, Gordon, stood still, Meta Beggs fell behind, as the former made his way toward them. Buckley spoke loudly when he was still an appreciable distance away:

“You were mighty considerate about my dusty throat,” he began with heavy sarcasm; “I ought to have seen at the time that you had it made up between you. This is the second time that you have broken in on me, Makimmon. I’m not a boy any longer. You can’t tread on me. It’s going to stop...now.”

“There’s nothing for you to get excited about, Buck. Miss Beggs and I took a little stroll while you were away.”

“A ‘little stroll.’” Buckley produced a heavy gold watch, the highly chased cover of which he snapped back. “Over half an hour,” he proclaimed; “you stayed too long this time.”

Gordon was aware of a form at his back. He turned, and saw Tol’able.

“What’s the trouble, Gord?” the latter asked. Two or three others were compactly grouped behind him.

“Why, Buckley’s hot because I walked with Miss Beggs while he took a drink.”

The men about Buckley Simmons closed up. “Don’t let Gordon crowd you down,” they advised their principal; “put it up against him.”

“Haven’t you got enough at home,” Buckley demanded, “without playing around here?”

Anger swiftly rose to Gordon Makimmon’s head. His hand fell and remained close by his side. “Keep your tongue off my home,” he commanded harshly, “or you will get more than a horsewhipping.”

“By God,” Buckley articulated. His face changed from dark to pale, his mouth opened, his eyes were staring. He fumbled desperately in his pocket. Gordon’s hand closed smoothly, instantly, about the handle of his revolver. But, before he could level it, an arm shot out from behind him, and a stone the size of two fists sped like a bullet, striking Buckley Simmons where his hair and forehead joined. Gordon, in a species of shocked curiosity and surprise, clearly saw the stone hit the other. There was a sound like that made by a heel breaking a scum of ice on a frozen road.

Buckley said, “Ah,” half turned, and dropped like a piece of carpet.

The belligerent attitude instantly evaporated from the group behind the stricken man. “Gracious,” some one muttered foolishly. They all joined in a stooping circle about the prostrate figure. It was seen immediately that the skull was broken—a white splinter of bone stood up from a matted surface of blood and hair and dirt. Buckley’s eyelids winked continuously and with great rapidity.

A mingled concern and deep relief swept through Gordon Makimmon. He knew that, had the stone not been thrown, he would have killed Buckley Simmons. He wondered if Tol’able had done him that act of loyalty. It had, probably, fatally wounded its object. He turned with a swift, silent look of inquiry to Tol’able. The other, unmoved, dexterously shifted a mouthful of tobacco. “Whoever did that,” he observed, “could sure throw a rock.”

A crowd gathered swiftly, cautious and murmuring. Simmons was lifted on a horse blanket to the flooring by the counter. There was an outcry for a doctor, but none was present, and it was agreed that the wounded man must be hurried into Greenstream. “He won’t get there alive,” it was freely predicted; “the top of his head is crumbled right off.”