SON OF THE WIND
Approaching the hotel he grew conscious of his dilapidated appearance. He stopped at the foot of Rader's Hill, where the creek crossed the main road, and washed off the blood that was drying uncomfortably upon his neck; but he was obliged to keep his handkerchief bound around the cut that still bled a little, and he was a spectacle of mud to the waist. He looked forward to meeting those people and their questions with an unconscious bracing of capacity. There was nothing extraordinary in a hunter having had hair-breadth escapes; but in a dry and burning season, and in a country of rock, there are few places where a man might drop into a mud-hole. There might be only one quicksand in the county. And what would a hunter have been doing upon a plain on the second day of his hunting? His mind saw the suspicion grow in Blanche Rader's confident eyes. As for Mrs. Rader, she already suspected him of something. And, woman fashion, she would, therefore, be prepared to suspect him of anything. The scholar, of course, would know what he had been about, and the old fellow had dropped him a hint that in his austere conception of the affair, the girl's refusal ought to put an end to the quest. Now, when he saw it had not, perhaps he would consider it his duty to reveal what was going forward. Carron felt he was going
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