“Go back to the house!” he shouted, savagely.
“Will you come?”
“Fer God's sake,” cried William Todd, “come back! Keep out of the road.” He was emptying his revolver at the clump of elder, the uproar of his firing blasting the night. Some one screamed from the house:
“Helen! Helen!”
John seized the girl's wrists roughly; her gray eyes flashed into his defiantly. “Will you go?” he roared.
“No!”
He dropped her wrists, caught her up in his arms as if she had been a kitten, and leaped into the shadow of the trees that leaned over the road from the yard. The rifle rang out again, and the little ball whistled venomously overhead. Harkless ran along the fence and turned in at the gate.
A loose strand of the girl's hair blew across his cheek, and in the moon her head shone with gold. She had light-brown hair and gray eyes and a short upper lip like a curled rose-leaf. He set her down on the veranda steps. Both of them laughed wildly.
“But you came with me!” she gasped triumphantly.
“I always thought you were tall,” he answered; and there was afterward a time when he had to agree that this was a somewhat vague reply.