The Highgrader

She brushed away the soft waves of dark hair that had fallen over her forehead in little escaping tendrils. The fearless level eyes of the outdoors West were looking straight at her.

"I don't know. Does it?"

"We'll say this evidence had piled up against Captain Kilmeny instead of against me. Would you have believed him guilty?"

"No. He couldn't have done it."

"On the same evidence you would acquit him and condemn me. Is that fair?"

"I have known him for years--his standards, his ways of thinking. All his life he has schooled himself to run a straight course."

"Whereas I----" He waited, the sardonic frosty smile on his lean strong face.

Moya knew that the flutter of her pulses was telling tales in the pink of her cheeks. "I don't know you."

"I'm only a workingman, and an American at that--so it follows that I must be a criminal," he answered with a touch of bitterness.

"No--no! But you're--different. There's something untamed about you. I don't quite know how to put it--as if you had been brought up without restraints, as if you didn't care much for law."

"Why should I? Law is a weapon to bolster up the rich and keep down the poor," he flung back with an acid smile. "But there's law and law. Even in our class we have our standards, such as they are."

"Now it's you that isn't fair," she told him quietly. "You know I meant nothing like that. The point is that I don't know what your standards are. Law doesn't mean so much to people here. Your blood runs freer, less evenly than ours. You don't let the conventions hamper you."

"The convention of honesty, for instance. Thanks, Miss Dwight."

"I didn't want to believe it, but----"

The penitence in her vivid face pleaded for her. He could not refuse the outstretched hand of this slender lance-straight girl whose sweet vitality was at once so delicate and so gallant. Reluctantly his palm met hers.

"You're quite sure now that I didn't do it?"

"Quite sure."

"Even though I've been brought up badly?"

"Oh, I didn't say badly--really. You know I didn't."

"And though I'm wild and lawless?"

"Aren't you?" she flashed back with a smile that took from the words any sting they might otherwise have had.

Mirth overflowed in his eyes, from which now many little creases radiated. "You're a good one, neighbor. But, since you will have it, I am. I reckon my standards even of honesty wouldn't square with yours. I live in a rough mining camp where questions have two sides. It's up to me to play the game the way the other fellow plays it. But we'll not go into that now."