“Sure, your father is after giving me notice,” he said.  “It’s little I would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it’s only a week that I’ve known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and I can’t live without you!”

“Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don’t speak so!” said the girl.  “I have told you, have I not, that you are too late?  There is another, and if I have not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else.”

“Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?”

The girl sank her face into her hands.  “I wish to heaven that you had been first!” she sobbed.

McMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant.  “For God’s sake, Ettie, let it stand at that!” he cried.  “Will you ruin your life and my own for the sake of this promise?  Follow your heart, acushla!  ’Tis a safer guide than any promise before you knew what it was that you were saying.”

He had seized Ettie’s white hand between his own strong brown ones.

“Say that you will be mine, and we will face it out together!”

“Not here?”

“Yes, here.”

“No, no, Jack!” His arms were round her now.  “It could not be here.  Could you take me away?”

A struggle passed for a moment over McMurdo’s face; but it ended by setting like granite.  “No, here,” he said.  “I’ll hold you against the world, Ettie, right here where we are!”

“Why should we not leave together?”

“No, Ettie, I can’t leave here.”

“But why?”

“I’d never hold my head up again if I felt that I had been driven out.  Besides, what is there to be afraid of?  Are we not free folks in a free country?  If you love me, and I you, who will dare to come between?”

“You don’t know, Jack.  You’ve been here too short a time.  You don’t know this Baldwin.  You don’t know McGinty and his Scowrers.”

“No, I don’t know them, and I don’t fear them, and I don’t believe in them!” said McMurdo.  “I’ve lived among rough men, my darling, and instead of fearing them it has always ended that they have feared me—­always, Ettie.  It’s mad on the face of it!  If these men, as your father says, have done crime after crime in the valley, and if everyone knows them by name, how comes it that none are brought to justice?  You answer me that, Ettie!”

“Because no witness dares to appear against them.  He would not live a month if he did.  Also because they have always their own men to swear that the accused one was far from the scene of the crime.  But surely, Jack, you must have read all this.  I had understood that every paper in the United States was writing about it.”

“Well, I have read something, it is true; but I had thought it was a story.  Maybe these men have some reason in what they do.  Maybe they are wronged and have no other way to help themselves.”

“Oh, Jack, don’t let me hear you speak so!  That is how he speaks—­the other one!”