But here, as if playfully exhilarated by the naughty foaming soda, she regarded him with her head—­and a good deal of her blonde hair—­very much on one side, as she said, “Do you know that all along o’ you bein’ so free with me in tellin’ your affairs I kinder feel like just telling you mine?”

“Don’t,” said Abner promptly.

“Don’t?” echoed Miss Budd.

“Don’t,” repeated Abner.  “It’s nothing to me.  What I said about myself is different, for it might make some difference to you.  But nothing you could say of yourself would make any change in me.  I stick to what I said just now.”

“But,” said Miss Budd,—­in half real, half simulated threatening,—­“what if it had suthin’ to do with my answer to what you said just now?”

“It couldn’t.  So, if it’s all the same to you, Miss Budd, I’d rather ye wouldn’t.”

“That,” said the lady still more archly, lifting a playful finger, “is your temper.”

“Mebbe it is,” said Abner suddenly, with a wondering sense of relief.

It was, however, settled that Miss Budd should go to Sacramento to visit her friends, that Abner would join her later, when their engagement would be announced, and that she should not return to the hotel until they were married.  The compact was sealed by the interchange of a friendly kiss from Miss Budd with a patient, tolerating one from Abner, and then it suddenly occurred to them both that they might as well return to their duties in the hotel, which they did.  Miss Budd’s entire outing that Sunday lasted only half an hour.

A week elapsed.  Miss Budd was in Sacramento, and the landlord of the Big Flume Hotel was standing at his usual post in the doorway during dinner, when a waiter handed him a note.  It contained a single line scrawled in pencil:—­

“Come out and see me behind the house as before.  I dussent come in on account of her.  C. Byers.”

“On account of ’her’!” Abner cast a hurried glance around the tables.  Certainly Mrs. Byers was not there!  He walked in the hall and the veranda—­she was not there.  He hastened to the rendezvous evidently meant by the writer, the wilderness behind the house.  Sure enough, Byers, drunk and maudlin, supporting himself by the tree root, staggered forward, clasped him in his arms, and murmured hoarsely,—­

“She’s gone!”

“Gone?” echoed Abner, with a whitening face.  “Mrs. Byers?  Where?”

“Run away!  Never come back no more!  Gone!”

A vague idea that had been in Abner’s mind since Byers’s last visit now took awful shape.  Before the unfortunate Byers could collect his senses he felt himself seized in a giant’s grasp and forced against the tree.

“You coward!” said all that was left of the tolerant Abner—­his even voice—­“you hound!  Did you dare to abuse her? to lay your vile hands on her—­to strike her?  Answer me.”