"Why don't you come in out of the heat, child?" called her sister, as reproachfully as if Melissa were going in the opposite direction. "We hain't had such a desert wind for more 'n a year. I keep thinkin' about Lysander. I've heern of people bein' took down with the heat, and havin' trouble ever afterward with their brains." "Lysander ain't a-goin' to have any trouble with his brains," said her mother significantly. Mrs. Sproul turned a highly insulted gaze upon the old woman's impassive face, and tilted her husband's hat defiantly above her diminutive, freckled countenance. "Lysander kin have as much trouble with his brains as anybody," she said, with bantam-like dignity, straightening her limp calico back, and tightening her grasp on the baby in her arms. The old woman elevated her shaggy brows, and made a half-mocking sound in imitation of the spitting of an angry kitten. Mrs. Sproul's pale blue eyes filled with indignant tears, and she turned toward Melissa, who looked up from the step, a gleam of sisterly sympathy lighting up the wan dejection of her young face. "I wouldn't fret, Minervy," she said kindly; "Lysander don't mind the heat. People never get sunstruck here; it's only back East. I don't think it's so very warm, nohow." "Oh, it's hot enough," sniffled Mrs. Sproul, relaxing her spine under Melissa's sympathy; "but it ain't altogether the heat. I don't like Lysander bein' mixed up with murderers and dangerous characters; not but what he's able to pertect himself, havin' been through the war, but it seems as if the harmlessest person wuzn't safe when folks go 'round shootin' right an' left without no provocation whatever. I think we'll all be safer when that young feller's locked up in San Quentin,--which they'll do with him, Lysander thinks." Mrs. Sproul drew a corner of her apron tight over her finger, and carefully wiped a speck from the corner of the baby's eye, gazing intently into the serene vacuity of its sleeping countenance as she spoke.