She cried her question passionately.  He had no answer ready.  Platitudes would not do for this child, he reflected, and to lecture her then even on the A B C’s of the social code would be wounding her ingenuous faith.

“If this is the way it all turns out, and I can’t have your friendship any longer, what is it that you’re going to do or I’m going to do?” she insisted.  “That’s losing too much, just because one is grown up.”

Tenderness surged in his heart toward this motherless girl—­tenderness in which there was a new quality.  But he had no answer for her just then.  He did not understand his own emotions.  He was as unsophisticated as she in the affairs of the heart.  His man’s life of the woods had kept him free from women.  His friendship with this child, their rides, their companionship, had been almost on the plane of boy with boy; her character invited that kind of intimacy.

And so he wondered what to say; for her demand had been explicit, and she demanded candor in return.

At that moment he welcomed the appearance of even Ivus Niles.  That sooty prophet of ill appeared around a bend in the read ahead.  The twilight shrouded him, but there was no mistaking his stove-pipe hat and his frock-coat.  He was leading his buck sheep, and the hounds rushed forward clamorously.  Niles stopped in the middle of the road, and let them frolic about him and his emblematic captive.

“The dogs won’t hurt you, Niles,” Harlan assured him, spurring forward.

“I ain’t afraid of dogs, I ain’t afraid of wolves, not after what I’ve been through with the political Bengal tigers I’ve been up against to-day,” Niles assured him, sourly.  “And your grandfather is the old he one of the pack.  You tell him—­”

“You can take your own messages to my grandfather, Niles.”  He swung his horse to pass, the girl at his side, but the War Eagle threw up his hand commandingly.

“I’ve got a message for you, yourself, then, and you stay here and take it.  He stole our caucus for you to-day, your grandfather did—­”

“You don’t mean to say I was nominated!”

“That’s too polite a word, Mr. Harlan Thornton.  I gave you the right one the first time.  He stampeded our caucus by having that fire set on the Jo Quacca hills.  Three sets of farm buildings offered up to the gods of rotten politics!  That’s a nice kind of sacrifice, Thornton’s grandson!  It goes well with the crowd you’re in with.  It will smell well in the nostrils of the people of this State.  You ought to be proud of being made a lawmaker in that way.”

It was not reproach—­it was insult, sneered in the agitator’s bitterest tone.

“The property of three poor toilers of the soil laid flat in ashes, a town terrified by danger rushing down through the heavens like the flight of the war eagle,” shouted Niles, declaiming after his accustomed manner, “and all to put you into a seat in the State House, where you can keep stealing the few things that your grandfather ain’t had time or strength to steal!  You’ve had your bonfire and your celebration—­now go down and hoist the Star-Spangled Banner over ’The Barracks’—­but you’d better hoist it Union down!”