He laughed under his breath—an unsteady sort of laugh, as if something had knocked at his habitual self control. There was only one answer to that gay, mocking challenge—only one—and that he could not give. He forgot for a little while that there were other people in the wagon. The poor babbling, grinning man across the way was not the only drunken man therein. Only one answer, and that to draw the form closer—closer to him—against his heart—for there was where she belonged. Fingers? What did he care for fingers now? He wanted to lay his face down against her soft hair—it was so perilously near. If only he might win in his fight! But even so, what would it matter? What could there ever be for her in this cruel, alien land? She had been so kindly and lovingly nurtured. In her heart nestled the home call—for all time. She was bound in its meshes. They would draw her sooner or later to her sure and inevitable destiny. And what was there for him elsewhere—after all these years? Kismet. He drew a long breath. “I’m a poor maverick, I suppose, marked with no man’s friendship. But you see I’m learning the language of the brotherhood. Why don’t you compliment me on my adaptability?” She looked up smilingly. She was hurt, but he should never know it. And he, because of the pain in him, answered almost roughly: “It is not a language for you to learn. You will never learn. Quit trying. You are not like us.” She, because she did not understand, felt the old homesick choking in her throat, and remembered with a reminiscent shudder of the first awful time she had spun along that road. Everybody seemed to spin in this strange land. She felt herself longing for the fat, lazy, old jogging horses of her country home. Horses couldn’t hurry there because the hills were too many and the roads too heavy. These lean, shaggy, range-bred horses were diabolical in their predilection for going. Hank’s surely were no exception to the rule. He pulled them up with a grand flourish at the edge of the steep incline leading directly upon the pontoon that bridged the narrowed river on the Kemah side of the island, and they stopped dead still with the cleanness worthy of cow ponies. The suddenness of the halt precipitated them all into a general mix-up. Gordon had braced himself for the shock, but Louise was wholly unprepared. She was thrown violently against him. The contact paled his face. The soft hair he had longed to caress in his madness brushed his cheek. He shivered. “Oh!” cried Louise, laughing and blushing, “I wasn’t expecting that!” Most of the men were already out and down on the bridge. A lone pedestrian was making his way across. “All safe?” queried Judge Dale, as he came up. “A little thin over the channel, but all safe if you cross a-foot.” “Suppose we walk across the island,” suggested the Judge, who occasionally overcame his indolence in spasmodic efforts to counteract his growing portliness, “and our friend Hank will meet us here in the morning.”