"But, Charley, I do care for you! I'm very, very fond of you."

"Well, don't make such a merit of it," he said, and they both laughed.

"I'm at an awful disadvantage, Betty, from having proposed so often.

That gives it a humorous touch which doesn't properly reflect the state of my feeling at all--and you hear me without the least emotion; so long as I keep my distance we might just as well be discussing the weather!"

"You are very good about that--"

"Keeping my distance, you mean?--Betty, if you knew how much resolution that calls for! I wonder if that isn't my mistake--" And Norton came a step nearer and took her in his arms.

With her hands on his shoulders Betty pushed him back, while the rich color came into her cheeks. She was remembering Bruce Carrington, who had not kept his distance.

"Please, Charley," she said half angrily, "I do like you tremendously, but I simply can't bear you when you act like this--let me go!"

"Betty, I despair of you ever caring for me!" and as Norton turned abruptly away he saw Tom Ware appear from about a corner of the house.

"Oh, hang it, there's Tom!"

"You are very nice, anyway, Charley--" said Betty hurriedly, fortified by the planter's approach.

Ware stalked toward them. Having dined with Betty as recently as the day before, he contented himself with a nod in her direction. His greeting to Norton was a more ambitious undertaking; he said he was pleased to see him; but in so far as facial expression might have indorsed the statement this pleasure was well disguised, it did not get into his features. Pausing on the terrace beside them, he indulged in certain observations on the state of the crops and the weather.

"You've lost a couple of n.i.g.g.e.rs, I hear?" he added with an oblique glance.

"Yes," said Norton.

"Got on the track of them yet?" Norton shook his head. "I understand you've a new overseer?" continued Ware, with another oblique glance.

"Then you understand wrong--Carrington's my guest," said Norton. "He's talking of putting in a crop for himself next season, so he's willing to help me make mine."

Betty turned quickly at the mention of Carrington's name. She had known that he was still at Thicket Point, and having heard him spoken of as Norton's new overseer, had meant to ask Charley if he were really filling that position. An undefined sense of relief came to her with Norton's reply to Tom's question.

"Going to turn farmer, is he?" asked Ware.

"So he says." Feeling that the only subjects in which he had ever known Ware to take the slightest interest, namely, crops and slaves, were exhausted, Norton was extremely disappointed when the planter manifested a disposition to play the host and returned to the house with them, where his mere presence, forbidding and sullen, was such a hardship that Norton shortly took his leave.

"Well, hang Tom!" he said, as he rode away from Belle Plain. "If he thinks he can freeze me out there's a long siege ahead of him!"

Issuing from the lane he turned his face in the direction of home, but he did not urge his horse off a walk. To leave Belle Plain and Betty demanded always his utmost resolution. His way took him into the solemn twilight of untouched solitudes. A cool breath rippled through the depths of the woods and shaped its own soft harmonies where it lifted the great branches that arched the road. He crossed strips of bottom land where the water stood in still pools about the gnarled and moss-covered trunks of trees. At intervals down some sluggish inlet he caught sight of the yellow flood that was pouring past, or saw the Arkansas coast beyond, with its mighty sweep of unbroken forest that rose out of the river mists and blended with the gray distance that lay along the horizon.

He was within two miles of Thicket Point when, pa.s.sing about a sudden turn in the road, he found himself confronted by three men, and before he could gather up his reins which he held loosely, one of them had seized his horse by the bit. Norton was unarmed, he had not even a riding-whip. This being the case he prepared to make the best of an unpleasant situation which he felt he could not alter. He ran his eye over the three men.

"I am sorry, gentlemen, but I reckon you have hold of the wrong person--"

"Get down!" said one of the men briefly.

"I haven't any money, that's why I say you have hold of the wrong person."

"We don't want your money." The unexpectedness of this reply somewhat disturbed Norton.

"What do you want, then?" he asked.

"We got a word to say to you."

"I can hear it in the saddle."

"Get down!" repeated the man, a surly, bull-necked fellow. "Come--hurry up!" he added.

Norton hesitated for an instant, then swung himself out of the saddle and stood in the road confronting the spokesman of the party.

"Now, what do you wish to say to me?" he asked.

"Just this--you keep away from Belle Plain."

"You go to h.e.l.l!" said Norton promptly. The man glowered heavily at hire through the gathering gloom of twilight.

"We want your word that you'll keep away from Belle Plain," he said with sullen insistence.

"Well, you won't get it!" responded Norton with quiet decision.

"We won't?"

"Certainly you won't!" Norton's eyes began to flash. He wondered if these were Tom Ware's emissaries. He was both quick-tempered and high-spirited. Falling back a step, he sprang forward and dealt the bullnecked man a savage blow. The latter grunted heavily but kept his feet. In the same instant one of the men who had never taken his eyes off Norton from the moment he quitted the saddle, raised his fist and struck the young planter in the back of the neck.

"You cur!" cried Norton, blind and dizzy, as he wheeled on him.

"d.a.m.n him--let him have it!" roared the bullnecked man.

Afterward Norton was able to remember that the three rushed on him, that he was knocked down and kicked with merciless brutality, then consciousness left him. He lay very still in the trampled dust of the road. The bull-necked man regarded the limp figure in grim silence for a moment.

"That'll do, he's had enough; we ain't to kill him this time," he said.

An instant later he, with his two companions, had vanished silently into the woods.

Norton's horse trotted down the road. When it entered the yard at Thicket Point half an hour later, Carrington was on the porch.

"Is that you, Norton?" he called, but there was no response, and he saw the horse was riderless. "Jeff!" he cried, summoning Norton's servant from the house.

"What's the matter, Mas'r?" asked the negro, as he appeared in the open door.

"Why, here's Mr. Norton's horse come home without him. Do you know where he went this afternoon?"

"I heard him say he reckoned he'd ride over to Belle Plain, Mas'r,"

answered Jeff, grinning. "I 'low the hoss done broke away and come home by himself--he couldn't a-throwed Mas'r Charley!"

"We'll make sure of that. Get lanterns, and a couple of the boys!" said Carrington.

It was mid-afternoon of the day following before Betty heard of the attack on Charley Norton. Tom brought the news, and she at once ordered her horse saddled and was soon out on the river road with a black groom trailing along through the dust in her wake. Tom's version of the attack was that Charley, had been robbed and all but murdered, and Betty never drew rein until she reached Thicket Point. As she galloped into the yard Bruce Carrington came from the house. At sight of the girl, with her wind-blown halo of bright hair, he paused uncertainly. By a gesture Betty called him to her side.

"How is Mr. Norton?" she asked, extending her hand.

"The doctor says he'll be up and about inside of a week, anyhow, Miss Malroy," said Carrington.