"Because we charge that the city hall is in the hands of plunderers and that for tribute they give criminals a free hand in preying on the citizens." "And yet," demurred the girl, with puzzled brow, "men like Judge McCabe laugh at all this 'reform hysteria,' as they call it. They aren't criminals." Boone nodded. "There are good men in the city hall, too, but they belong to the old system that puts the party label above everything else." They reached the brow of the hill and stood, their horses breathing heavily from the climb, looking off across the country where on the far side other knobs went trooping away to meet the sky. The bridles hung loose, and the girl sat looking off over leagues of landscape with grave eyes, while Boone of course looked at her. The beauty of the green earth and blue sky was to his adoration only a background for her nearer beauty. The boy, as he gazed at the delicate modelling of her brow and chin, wondered what was going on in her thoughts, for there was a wistful droop at the corner of her lips; yet presently, even while it lingered there, a twinkle riffled in her eyes. "I ought to be all wrought up, I suppose, over this crusade on wickedness," she announced, though with no sense of guilt in her voice, "and yet if it weren't for my friends being in it, I doubt whether it would mean much to me--. I've got too much politics of my own to worry about." "Politics of your own?" he questioned. "Why, Anne, your monarchy is absolute; there isn't a voice of anarchy or rebellion anywhere in your gracious majesty's realm--and your realm is your whole world." Boone, the bluntly direct of speech, was coming on in the less straitened domain of the figurative. Anne was teaching him the bright lessons of gaiety. She laughed and drew back her shoulders with a mock hauteur. "Our Viceroy from the Mountain Dominions flatters us. We have, however, the Mother Dowager--and we approach the age for a suitable alliance." The two horses were standing so close together that the riders were almost knee to knee, and just then they had the hilltop to themselves. The humorous smile that had been on the lips of the young mountaineer vanished as characters on a slate are obliterated under a sponge. His cheeks, still bronzed from a mountain summer, went suddenly pale--and he found nothing to say. What was there to say, he reflected? When the mentor of a man's common sense has forewarned him that he is being shadowed by an inevitable spectre, and when that spectre steps suddenly out into his path, he should not be astonished. Boone only sat there with features branded under the shock of suffering. His fine young shoulders, all at once, seemed to lose something of their straight vigour and to grow tired. His palms rested inertly on his saddle pommel. But the girl leaned impulsively forward and laid one of her gloved hands over his. Her voice was a caress--touched with only a pardonable trace of reproach.