Me Smith

a whir. Big he was, in comparison with his kind, as the monster steer in the side-show, the Cardiff giant, or Jumbo the mammoth.
    “Oh!” cried Dora; “we must have him!” and they ran side by side in wild, determined pursuit.
    The insect sailed far and fast, but they could not lose sight of him, for he was like an aeroplane in flight, and when in an ill-advised moment he lit to gather himself, they fell upon him tooth and nail—to use a phrase. Dora’s hand closed over the grasshopper, and Ralston’s closed over Dora’s, holding it tight in one confused moment of delicious, tongue-tied silence.
    Her shoulder touched his, her hair brushed his cheek. He wished that they might go on holding down that grasshopper until the end of time. She was panting with the exertion, her nose was moist like a baby’s when it sleeps, and he noticed in a swift, sidelong glance that the pupils of her eyes all but covered the iris.
    “He—he’s wiggling!” she said tremulously.
    “Is he?” Ralston asked fatuously, at a loss for words, but making no move to lift his hand.
    “And there’s a cactus in my finger.”
    “Let me see it.” Immediately his face was full of deep concern.
    He held her fingers, turning the small pink palm upward.
    “We must get it out,” he declared firmly. “They poison some people.”
    He wondered if it was imagination, or did her hand tremble a little in his? His relief was not unmixed with disappointment when the cactus spine came out easily.
    “They hurt—those needles.” He continued to regard the tiny puncture with unabated interest.
    “Tra! la! la!” sang Susie from the brow of the hill. “Old Smith is comin’.”
    Ralston dropped Dora’s hand, and they both reddened, each wondering how long Susie had been doing picket duty.
    “Out for your failin’ health, Mister Smith?” inquired Susie, with solicitude.
    “I’m huntin’ horses, and hopin’ to pick up a bunch of ponies cheap,” he replied with ugly significance as he rode by.
    And while the soft light faded from Ralston’s eyes, the color leaped to his face; unconsciously his fists clenched as he looked after Smith’s vanishing back. It was the latter’s first overt act of hostility; Ralston knew, and perhaps Smith intended it so, that the clash between them must now come soon.
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    X
MOTHER LOVE AND SAVAGE PASSION CONFLICT
    It was Sunday, a day later, when Susie came into the living-room and noticed her mother sewing muskrat around the top of a moccasin. It was a man’s moccasin. The woman had made no men’s moccasins since her husband’s death. The sight chilled the girl.
    “Mother,” she asked abruptly, “what do you let that hold-up hang around here for?”
    “Who you mean?” the woman asked quickly.
    “That Smith!” Susie spat out the word like something offensive.
    The Indian woman avoided the girl’s eyes.
    “I like him,” she answered.
    “Mother!”
    “Maybe he stay all time.” Her tone was stubborn, as though she expected and was prepared to resist an attack.
    “You don’t—you can’t —mean it!”. Susie’s thin face flushed scarlet with shame.
    “Sa-ah,” the woman nodded, “I mean it;” and Susie, staring at her in a kind of terror, saw that she did.
    “Oh, Mother! Mother!” she cried passionately, dropping on the floor at the woman’s feet and clasping her arms convulsively about the Indian woman’s knees. “Don’t—don’t say that! We’ve always been a little different from the rest. We’ve always held our heads up. People like us and respect us—both Injuns and white. We’ve never been talked about—you and me—and now you are going to spoil it all!”
    “I get tied up to him right,” defended the woman sullenly.
    “Oh, Mother!” wailed the child.
    “We need good white man to run de ranch.”
    “But Smith —do you think he’s good? Good! Is a rattlesnake good? Can’t you see what he is, Mother?—you who are smarter than me in seeing through people? He’s mean—onery to the marrow—and some day sure— sure —he’ll turn, and strike his fangs into you.”
    “He no onery,” the woman replied, in something like anger.
    “It’s his nature,” Susie went on, without heeding her. “He can’t help it. All his thoughts and talk and schemes are about something crooked. Can’t you tell by the things he lets drop that he ought to be in the ’pen’? He’s treacherous, ungrateful, a born thief. I saw him take Tubbs’s halter, and there was the