"But ye hain't a-goin' fer always? Ye aims ter come back ter me ergin in good time, don't ye?"
For a little while he held her tightly clasped with his lips pressed to her soft hair, then he spoke impetuously:
"I aims ter come back ter ye right soon."
"Ye mustn't come twell hit's safe, though," she commanded, and after that she asked softly: "Now thet we're plighted I reckon ye don't forbid me ter tell my pappy, does ye?"
Henderson's muscles grew suddenly rigid and beads of sweat moistened his forehead in spite of the frosty tang of the morning air.
The words brought back a sudden and terrifying realization; the renewed conflict of a dilemma. He was going out into the other world, leaving the dead reckoning of the primal for the calculated standards of modernity. He was plighted to a semi-illiterate! Yet as her breath came fragrantly from upturned lips against his temples, all that went down under a wave of passionate love.
"No, Blossom," he advised steadily, "don't tell him yet. There are things that must be arranged—things that are hard to explain to you just now. Wait until I come back. I've got to study out this attack from ambush so that I can know whom I'm fighting and how to fight. It may take time—and if I write to you, naming a place,—will you come to me?"
Gravely and with full trust she nodded her head. "I'll come anywhars—an' any time—to you," she told him, and the man kissed her good-bye.
Turner Stacy's longing to see Blossom had driven him to the imprudence of breaking the restrictions of exile. After traveling by night and hiding by day it happened that he was breasting a ridge just at sunrise one morning on his way to her house, when his alert gaze caught an indistinct movement through the hazy half-light of the dawn. He could make out only that two figures seemed coming west along the mist-veiled path and that they appeared to be the figures of a man and a woman.