This time Mary answered. She did not dare keep silent. The tramp might become angry. "Good-morning," she faltered. Vivian said nothing. She was waiting for Mary to plan a means of escape. Meanwhile Siwash and his companion, feeling their reins tighten, had stopped and were nibbling at the quaking-asps, quite undisturbed. Mr. Crusoe rose, hat in hand. "Was you plannin' to ford, young ladies?" he asked politely. The vanishing flanks of two horses, unceremoniously yanked away from their luncheon and turned toward the prairie, were his only answer. Mr. Crusoe gazed wonderingly into a cloud of dust. Then he felt of his washing on the quaking-asp. It was dry enough. Laying his pipe and hat on the ground, he proceeded to get into the clean shirt. "Poor little things!" he said from its somewhat damp depths. "They was plum scared of me!" The shirt on, he did its mate into a bundle, cut a forked stick upon which to sling it, stamped out the last ember of his dying fire, took his hat and pipe, and started north up the creek trail. Vivian and Mary did not stop their wild gallop until they were well in sight of the nearest house on the prairie. Blue gentians for Miss Wallace, which had been their errand, were quite forgotten. So also was the glory of the morning. Instead, there ever rose before their still startled eyes a black-whiskered, coatless man, smoking the stub of a dirty pipe beneath a cottonwood. "Mary," said Vivian, gathering courage as the Keith house came into view, and breaking a long, frightened silence, "Mary, did you ever see any one so villainous-looking in your life--outside of the movies, I mean? I guess my heart will never stop thumping! I wish Virginia had been with us! She's always saying there's no one around here to harm any one. I just wish she had!" "I sort of wish we hadn't run so," returned Mary, pulling her horse down to a walk. "Maybe he wasn't any one harmful at all, only he scared me so I never stopped to think. I'd hate to be a snob, even to a tramp!" "I wouldn't! I glory in it! And, besides, you needn't worry. It takes time to be a snob, and we didn't waste a moment. Here's the Keith house. Hadn't we best go in for a moment? There's Carver now playing with Kenneth." The Keiths, upon hearing the story, quieted Vivian's fears, and confirmed Mary's increasing regret. The man was only a hobo, Donald said, doubtless seeking work. They looked unmistakably rough, but were often good fellows inside. Probably he wouldn't have frightened them for the world. "I wish this fellow would stray our way," he added. "We're going to be in need of extra hands when threshing comes, and it won't be long now. Dad would welcome him all right."