She stepped out upon the road, and for a moment the sun claimed her for its own, drenching her through and through with its luminous rays like a spot-light from a distant gallery on the figure of a woodland nymph. It touched with gold the girl’s white-clad figure, her silken hair, her wonderfully fair skin, and lighted her eager, young face--a primitive face, but with the beauty of a wild rose half opened. She might have been eighteen or a little less. Much of the child was still left, but the mouth had already begun to harden and the eyes to question. At this moment, however, both eyes and mouth were gently smiling, moved into unconscious harmony with the picture before her--the slope pied with mountain daisies half asleep under the soft radiance of the setting sun; the sanded road burnished to a golden sheen, and finally the stream in front where the scattered shafts of light spent themselves in flashing from stone to stone. It was a setting worthy of the princes of the fairy books she had lately been reading--reading as children read. Bud, still motionless, saw her--but not wholly as a prince might have seen her. His eyes noted scarcely more than her pretty figure suggested by the curve of her neck, the litheness of her movements and the trim ankles. Her appeal to him was the primitive appeal of a woman to man. And yet she was not just any woman, even though she was not the first upon whom he had looked greedily. He was conscious of that at once. She was prettier than most for one thing. And something more besides, although he did not attempt to analyze his emotions. He was more interested in speaking to her. In response to a tugging at his bridle, the horse moved lingeringly out of the stream into the road. Then the girl, startled, wide-eyed, looked up. For a second she seemed about to turn and run. Then, as though thinking better of that, she faced the man. The latter grinned; partly to assure her of his good nature and partly because the sight of any one suddenly surprised was amusing. “Afeard?” he asked. She raised her head still higher. She recognized the man now. From all she had heard about him she was entitled to be afraid. But the woods were near and she could run in them like a deer. “No,” she answered quietly. “I ’lowed mebbe you’d heard tales about me.” She remained uncompromisingly silent. “My name’s Bud Childers,” he announced. She made no reply, but shifted the sack forward on her arm as though about to go on. “What’s yourn?” he demanded. “Roxie Kester.” He sidled his horse nearer. “Let me have that air sack. I’m goin’ your way, I reckon.” “It ain’t heavy,” she replied, shrinking out of reach. “Might as well,” he insisted with his wrinkled, calloused hands outstretched; “me on a horse and you on your feet.” “It ain’t heavy.” “Might as well--me a man and you a woman.” “I kin carry it all right.”