"It must have been hard," agreed Kurt. "Didn't you find out anything at all?"
"Not much," she replied. Then she put a hand on his sleeve. "Your knuckles are all bloody."
"So they are. I got that punching our German friend."
"Oh, how you did beat him!" she cried. "I had to look. My ire was up, too!… It wasn't very womanly—of me—that I gloried in the sight."
"But you cried out—you pulled me away!" exclaimed Kurt.
"That was because I was afraid you'd kill him," she replied.
Kurt swerved his glance, for an instant, to her face. It was at once flushed and pale, with the deep blue of downcast eyes shadowy through her long lashes, exceedingly sweet and beautiful to Kurt's sight. He bent his glance again to the road ahead. Miss Anderson felt kindly and gratefully toward him, as was, of course, natural. But she was somehow different from what she had seemed upon the other occasions he had seen her. Kurt's heart was full to bursting.
"I might have killed him," he said. "I'm glad—you stopped me. That—that frenzy of mine seemed to be the breaking of a dam. I have been dammed up within. Something had to break. I've been unhappy for a long time."
"I saw that. What about?" she replied.
"The war, and what it's done to father. We're estranged. I hate everything German. I loved the farm. My chance in life is gone. The wheat debt—the worry about the I.W.W.—and that's not all."