The Secret of the Storm Country

"I think I do," he nodded presently. "Only I am placed in a very peculiar position. By rights I ought to send you back--then help you afterward if I can."

Tessibel sat up, her eyes wildly frightened.

"Ye couldn't do that!" she cried. "Ye couldn't do that! Don't ye remember a day on the rocks, when I was awful sad, an' you said, 'Tess, if ye ever want me to do anything for ye, come and tell me.' Didn't ye say it?"

Young bowed his head.

"I air askin' it now," said Tess, throwing out her hand. "I air beggin' ye not to send Andy back. Let 'im stay with me. I promised Daddy I'd take care of 'im."

"Lie down again and be quiet, child," urged Deforrest, sadly. "You don't want to make yourself sick.... Hush, you mustn't cry!... Oh, child dear, will you please stop shaking that way?"

He had forgotten that when Tess loved any one, she would battle until her death before she gave him up.

"Then don't send little Andy back, an' I'll be awful good," she pleaded.

Young sat for some time, one hand on Tessibel's, the other beating a tatoo on the arm of Daddy's wooden rocker.

"I suppose," he said at length, as if speaking to himself, "I'll be highly criticized if any one finds out about this irregular proceeding. Nevertheless--" He turned to Tess. "I'll go quietly to work and see what I can do. In the meantime, dear child, you can't stay here in this house."

"But I promised Daddy I'd take care of Andy here, an' I air goin' to. Him and me can live here all right."

Young sighed. There was the same stubborn tone in her voice she had used in those days when her father was away in prison, and he had argued with her to leave the settlement.

"Well, at any rate," he said after a while, "I'll take time to consider it, and then we'll decide something."

Ten minutes later he was riding slowly up the hill, and as the past panoramied across his mind ... and evolved itself into the present, he shook his head. Tessibel had separated him from his family, had made him a stranger to his best friends. Would she now, by holding to Waldstricker's convicted murderer, deprive him of his honor?