“I think, Mr. Carleton, we had better stop,” she said hesitatingly.  “I don’t believe your enmity is so ungenerous as to wish to cause me unpleasantness.  You surely are convinced now that I am not afraid of you, so the truce is over.”

I did not pretend to misunderstand.  “I’m going home at once,” I told her gently, “and I shall take my spectacular crowd along with me; but I’m not sorry I came, and I hope you are not.”

She looked at me soberly, and then away.  “There is one thing I should like to say,” she said, in so low a tone I had to lean to catch the words.  “Please don’t try to ride through King’s Highway again; father hates you quite enough as it is, and it is scarcely the part of a gentleman to needlessly provoke an old man.”

I could feel myself grow red.  What a cad I must seem to her!  “King’s Highway shall be safe from my vandal feet hereafter,” I told her, and meant it.

“So long as you keep that promise,” she said, smiling a bit, “I shall try to remember mine enemy with respect.”

“And I hope that mine enemy shall sometimes view the beauties of White Divide from a little distance—­say half a mile or so,” I answered daringly.

She heard me, but at that minute that Weaver chap came up, and she began talking to him as though he was her long-lost friend.  I was clearly out of it, so I told Edith and her mother good night, bowed to “Aunt Lodema” and got the stony stare for my reward, and rounded up my crowd.

We passed old King in a body, and he growled something I could not hear; one of the boys told me, afterward, that it was just as well I didn’t.  We rode away under the stars, and I wished that night had been four times as long, and that Beryl King would be as nice to me as was Edith Loroman.

CHAPTER VII.

One Day Too Late!

I suppose there is always a time when a fellow passes quite suddenly out of the cub-stage and feels himself a man—­or, at least, a very great desire to be one.  Until that Fourth of July life had been to me a playground, with an interruption or two to the game.  When dad took such heroic measures to instil some sense into my head, he interrupted the game for ten days or so—­and then I went back to my play, satisfied with new toys.  At least, that is the way it seemed to me.  But after that night, things were somehow different.  I wanted to amount to something; I was absolutely ashamed of my general uselessness, and I came near writing to dad and telling him so.

The worst of it was that I didn’t know just what it was I wanted to do, except ride over to that little pinnacle just out from King’s Highway, and watch for Beryl King; that, of course, was out of the question, and maudlin, anyway.

On the third day after, as Frosty and I were riding circle quite silently and moodily together, we rode up into a little coulee on the southwestern side of White Divide, and came quite unexpectedly upon a little picnic-party camped comfortably down by the spring where we had meant to slake our own thirst.  Of course, it was the Kings’ house-party; they were the only luxuriously idle crowd in the country.