The son tried hard to reason, tried harder to explain, all to no avail. The unlettered giant would listen to nothing. It angered Little Buck in spite of himself. "I've given my word, just as you've given yours," he said spiritedly; "and, as I'm a Wolfe, just as well as you are, I'll keep my word if I live. The lumber track and the mill are coming, and it doesn't greatly matter who likes it or who doesn't." Old Buck stalked off. His son then regretted that he had lost his temper. V Tot Singleton didn't go home just then. There was nothing she could do at home. Her mother was a very strong, stout woman who didn't want any "dreamin' gyurls a-piddlin'" in her household affairs; who sometimes worked in the woods with an ax, or hoed corn, or helped to make a run of whisky; and who lightened her daily burdens by the constant whistling of old-fashioned hymns. The young woman absentmindedly destroyed a hundred or so of black-eyed mountain daisies by pulling off their defenseless heads between her bare toes; then she went back to her shrine--it was just that to this unspoiled creature who had been half child and half woman at sixteen and was very nearly the same today. She stood leaning against the body of the willow, and thought over all that had happened there; looked at the marks Little Buck Wolfe's high-laced boots had made in the sand, at the marks of the struggle that had been so short and so one-sided. Soon she went to the edge of the creek, and peered into the crystal water. He hadn't known about the pool's being so shallow now, when he had thrown the ring into it. She gathered up her calico skirts in one hand, waded in, found the ring, and hastened back to the sand-bar. Tot looked at it closely now. It sparkled so in the same yellow disc of sunlight that had burnished the copper of her hair a little while before; almost it hurt her eyes! Wonderment and something very different from wonderment wrote their signs alternately on her countenance. She pressed the ring on her engagement finger, and tried to imagine that it was her own engagement ring; but the iron truth wouldn't be forgotten even for a moment, and a wee smile of intense hurt came to the lips that the sweetheart of those happy other days had so recently kissed in so chivalrous a manner. When she tried to get the ring off, it wouldn't come! Perhaps she didn't try very hard. Anyway, she laughed a little to herself, and her blue eyes were as bright as stars. Tot Singleton went slowly up the bank of the creek, going homeward by instinct rather than by design. And she had not covered half of the mile when she met her father and the slouching young man they called Cat-Eye, both of whom were armed with rifles. [Illustration]