She looked so abject, so pitiful, so alone in her misery that Allston could no more refrain from what he did next than he could have refrained from picking up an outcast kitten mewing in the cold. He stepped nearer and gathered her into his arms. She came unresisting--weak from the continued tension of these last hours. She buried her face on his shoulder, trying hard at first to stifle her sobs, but finally letting herself go completely. Allston held her tenderly and in silence. That seemed to be the only thing to do. Words were quite useless; reason, unavailing. Whether she was right or wrong or he right or wrong was not, in such a crisis, important. This was some isolated moment to be handled by itself. If he could not respond with the deep emotion that stirred her, he felt his cheeks burning in answer to the clinging appeal of her warm arms, to the clean incense of her hair, to the feverish eagerness of her rapid breathing. He would have been either less or more than man had he remained insensible. Lightly he brushed her flaxen hair with his lips. He felt as though he had been swept back a hundred years--a thousand, for all he knew; back to some time when the world was made up of nothing but stars and trees and men and women. This mountain shack of hewn logs might have been his own. And all he saw and all he knew was what it contained and what the forest roundabout contained. The rest of the world counted for no more than it did before the days of maps. Life must be lived and its problems, as far as they concerned him, settled right here. Unconsciously his arms tightened about her lithe young body. In response she raised her flushed face a little--shyly, but with new confidence. “You won’t go--now?” she whispered. Her words startled him back to the present. His arms fell to his side. “Now I _ought_ to go!” he cried. A shattered pane of glass followed the report of a gun. Some one outside was beginning to probe the shadows. CHAPTER XX Bud, after making his escape, ran down the mountain road to the home of Roge Carver, where he borrowed a rifle and ammunition. Roge loaned both without either question or comment, although later he admitted to his neighbors that it did occur to him that the incident was more or less unusual. It was not easy to understand how Bud happened to be without a gun of his own when within so short a distance of his shack, or why he needed one, anyway, on a stormy night at one o’clock in the morning. “He was all riled up,” explained Roge. “So I didn’ hold no talk with ’um.” No one disputed that as an unwise decision. When a man like Bud goes gunning in the dead of night, he is best left alone. The explanation Roge offered his wife when he returned to bed seemed fairly reasonable. “Mebbe one o’ them Enfield boys is prowlin’ round.”