But the effect of the words was instantaneous. Nixon nor none of those about knew why nor how. All they knew was that Tom Mewha relaxed his threatening attitude; straightened to his full magnificent six feet four; swung up a hand. "Put it there," he said: this Peril of the west. CHAPTER XXV. WHY? Jim Burns thought he had never seen anything more girlishly attractive than his former playmate Daisy, as she romped over the honeycombed March drifts with Rover, the patriarchal but galvanized Nixon collie. An old wool cap of her mother's was perched on the side of her head; her hair was gathered in a careless braid behind; her skirt was of the shortest; her face had a schoolgirl color and a schoolgirl dance. "Say, why d'n you wait for about ten years more anyway before you got married up, Daise?" Daisy, as her chase of Rover brought her close, stopped and regarded her questioner teasingly. Rover waited, wagging from neck to tail like a young pup. "I suppose you mean that you'd have been about ready to say something then, eh?" she remarked, putting her head on one side. "No," said Jim Burns, a little shortly; "what I mean is, that you ought to be goin' to school instead of bein' married." "Would you object to me being married, if I was married to you?" was Daisy's response, as she tweaked Rover's tail. "Say, Daise," Jim Burns blurted out headlong a query he had carried around in his brain for some days, "why did you marry that old fellow? Wasn't there no young ones handy? I know you didn't marry him for his money: you ain't that kind. I can't figure the thing out nohow, Daise." Daisy Ware's eyes, as she looked at her questioner silently for a moment, did not see him. Neither did they see the farm barn, the straw-bucks in the distance, the thawing ice at the cattle-trough, the drifts reduced to liquefying ice by the spring sun. For the girl was back in a massive ugly upstairs hall, with broom and dustpan, facing the son of a pile-driving millionaire who was trying to, after the pattern of his parent, "put her where she belonged;" in her memory again, as there had been on that occasion, a certain man equal in fortune but very different otherwise, who had in spite of his apparent fifty or so years, made her a boyish and eager proposal of marriage. "Because," Daisy, this picture out of the past in her mind, answered Jim Burns unconsciously, by what was really a sentence thought aloud, "I wanted to show some people where they got off at." Jim Burns' legs went numb at the vigor with which she said this. His hands opened loosely, and his pitchfork slid out of them. "Well," he gulped, presently, "you needn't have went and did a trick like that. Why couldn't you have given me a hint, Daise?" At this, Daisy came out of her reverie and stared. "Given you a hint?" she repeated, "wha--o-oh I see. Well, that's what you get by being slow, Mr. Man. See!"