June knew the subject was closed. She might have pushed deeper into her father's reticence, but some instinct shrank from what she might uncover. There could be only pain in learning the secret he so carefully hid. There had been no discussion of it between them, nor had it been necessary to have any. It was tacitly understood that they would have little traffic with their neighbors, that only at rare intervals would Pete drive to Meeker, Glenwood Springs, or Bear Cat to dispose of furs he had trapped and to buy supplies. The girl's thoughts and emotions were the product largely of this isolation. She brooded over the mystery of her father's past till it became an obsession in her life. To be brought into close contact with dishonor makes one either unduly sensitive or callously indifferent. Upon June it had the former effect. The sense of inferiority was branded upon her. She had seen girls giggling at the shapeless sacks she had stitched together for clothes with which to dress herself. She was uncouth, awkward, a thin black thing ugly as sin. It had never dawned on her that she possessed rare potentialities of beauty, that there was coming a time when she would bloom gloriously as a cactus in a sand waste. After dinner June went down to the creek and followed a path along its edge. She started up a buck lying in the grass and watched it go crashing through the brush. It was a big-game country. The settlers lived largely on venison during the fall and winter. She had killed dozens of blacktail, an elk or two, and more than once a bear. With a rifle she was a crack shot. But to-day she was not hunting. She moved steadily along the winding creek till she came to a bend in its course. Beyond this a fishing-rod lay in the path. On a flat rock near it a boy was stretched, face up, looking into the blue, unflecked sky. CHAPTER III PALS He was a red-headed, stringy boy between eighteen and nineteen years old. His hands were laced back of the head, but he waggled a foot by way of greeting. "'Lo, June," he called. "What you doin'?" she demanded. "Oh, jes' watchin' the grass grow." She sat down beside him, drawing up her feet beneath the skirt and gathering the knees between laced fingers. Moodily, she looked down at the water swirling round the rocks. Bob Dillon said nothing. He had a capacity for silence that was not uncompanionable. They could sit by the hour, these two, quite content, without exchanging a dozen sentences. The odd thing about it was that they were not old friends. Three weeks ago they had met for the first time. He was flunkeying for a telephone outfit building a line to Bear Cat. "A man stayed up to the house last night," she said at last. He leaned his head on a hand, turning toward her. The light blue eyes in the freckled face rested on those of the girl. Presently she added, with a flare of surging anger, "I hate him." "Why?" The blood burned beneath the tan of the brown cheeks. "'Cause."