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“I haven’t thanked you yet for saving me—risking your life—jumping barbed wire.”

He gave a short laugh.

“A lot of risk in that! Nigger never makes a mistake over wire. He’s too old a hand at it for that.”

“Do you mean you’ve jumped it before?”

He looked up into her face to see if she was, as he would have put it, “pulling his leg,” but her sweet, candid eyes gazed down at him in genuine amazement.

“Hundreds of times,” he answered.

“It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. You and your horse were like one being—winged for flight.” Suddenly she laughed. “I don’t know how I managed to find time to think all that. I was rather busy just then.”

He looked up again and smiled at her. He was leading Nigger now; walking at the horse’s shoulder. They reached the gate, and he opened it.

“Let me ride through—all by myself,” she said.

Her voice was like a coaxing child. The young man laughed.

“Right you are. Take up the reins. No! not like that. In your left hand. There! that one between those fingers, and this one—so.”

His hands—roughened and soiled, but still well-shaped and sensitive—guided hers.

“Don’t pull on the bridle. You’ll never ride if you pull on a horse’s mouth. Good hands mean everything in a rider.”

“And you have better hands than Mr. Holmes.”

“Who told you that?”

“A little bird told me that.”

“Biddy, I’ll bet. Biddy always barracks for me as