“You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don’t you, girl?” he said, in sheerest self-gratulation.  “That’s what I like in you.  You asked me a little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a man of me, Nan, if you’d try.”

He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came over her lighted a strange fire in his blood.  The black eyes kindled it, and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze.  His face flushed and he broke the eye-hold and looked down.  In their primal state, when Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.

“If you’d said that two year ago,” she began, in a half-whisper that melted the marrow in his bones.  “But you was on’y a boy then; and now I reckon it’s too late.”

“You mean that you don’t care for me any more, Nan?  I know better than that.  You’d back me if I had come up here to tell you that I’d killed somebody.  Wouldn’t you, now?”

He waited overlong for his answer.  There were sounds in the air:  a metallic tapping like the intermittent drumming of a woodpecker mingled with a rustling as of some small animal scurrying back and forth over the dead leaves.  The girl leaned forward, listening intently.  Then three men appeared in the farther crooking of the spring path, and at the first glimpse of them she slipped from the flat stone to cower behind Tom, trembling, shaking with terror.

“Hide me, Tom-Jeff!  Oh, for God’s sake, hide me, quick!” she panted.  “Lookee there!”

He looked and saw the three men walking slowly up the pipe-line which drained the barrel-spring.  They were too far away to be recognizable to him, and since they were stopping momently to examine the pipe, there was good hope of an escape unseen.

Tom waited breathless for the propitious instant when the tapping of the pipe-men’s hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement.  When it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled swiftly after her.

Before she could rise he had picked her up and was dragging her to the climbing point under the lip of the boulder cave.

“Up with you!” he commanded, making a step of his hand.  “Give me your foot and then climb to my shoulder—­quick!” But she drew back.

“Oh, I can’t!” she gasped.  “I—­I’m too skeered!”

Tom’s brows went together in the Gordon frown.  Bone-meltings and blood-firings apart, he was neither a fool nor a dastard, and he was older now than on that day when the storm had driven them to take refuge in the heart of the great rock.  And since he had decided that the cavern was only big enough for one, he had meant to put Nan up, going himself to meet the intruders to make sure that they should not discover her.  But her trembling fit—­a new and curious thing in the girl who used to make his flesh creep with her reckless daring—­spoiled the plan.