“I'll kiss you if I have to wade into that spring.”
“If I had a brother,—oh, if I even had a father,” she said, looking at him with a flash of Conway fire in her eyes—“and you did—you would not live till morning—you know you wouldn't.”
She stood now knee-deep in water. Above her the half-drunken boy, standing on the rock which projected into the spring, emboldened with drink and maddened by the thought that she had so easily given him up, had reached out and seized her around the neck. He was rough, and it choked her as he drew her to him.
She screamed for the first time—for she thought she heard hoof beats coming down the road; then she heard a horseman clear the low fence and spur into the spring branch. The water from the horse's feet splashed over her. She remembered it only faintly—the big glasses—the old straw hat,—the leathern bag of samples around his shoulders.
“Most unusual,” she heard him say, with more calmness it seemed to Helen than ever: “Quite unusual—insultingly so!”
Instinctively she held up her arms and he stooped in the saddle and lifted her up and set her on the stone curbing on the side farthest from Harry Travis.
Then he turned and very deliberately reached over and seized Harry Travis, who stood on the rock, nearly on a line with the pommel of the saddle. But the hand that gripped the back of Harry's neck was anything but gentle. It closed around the neck at the base of the brain, burying its fingers in the back muscles with paralyzing pain and jerked him face downward across the saddle with a motion so swift that he was there before he knew it. Then another hand seized him and rammed his mouth, as he lay across the pommel of the saddle, into the sweaty shoulders below the horse's withers, and he felt the horse move out and into the road and up to the crossing of the ways just as a buggy and two fast bay mares came around the corner.
The driver of the bays stopped as he saw his cousin thrown like a pig over the pommel and held there kicking and cursing.
“I was looking for him,” said Richard Travis quietly, “but I would like to know what it all means.”
The big glasses shone in kindly humor. They did not reflect any excitement in the eyes behind them.