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"Oh me! Oh me!" She pulled her fingers through one another, looking about as if to find a way out of the troubles that encompassed her. Her eyes lighted on the teamster almost as if she had never seen him before. She wet her lips.

"Abner," she whispered, "will you marry me?"

At the expression that came over his face she put up her hands and involuntarily dropped on her knees before him.

"Oh, Abner, Abner, please, ple-e-a-s-e, if you don't, I'm lost, I'm lost. . . ."

At his instinctive step backward her forearms settled on the floor and her head upon them. Her bright hair sagged forward in an awkward manner as she sobbed on her arms. To Abner there was something painful and pitiful, yet profoundly repellent, in the scene. In Nessie's utter ignorance she had selected the most inopportune of all moments to make a plea of marriage to her lover—the moment of satiety.

The teamster mumbled something about not making enough money to get married—two dollars a day—somehow he spent it all as it was. . . .

Nessie got slowly to her feet with tear-stained face, apparently not aware that she had just proposed marriage in utter abasement and had been clumsily rebuffed. Her mind really was not on marriage at all, but was searching fearfully for away out of her threatened exposure. She thought of another plan.

"Abner, you haven't told anybody but Zed, have you?"

"Good God, no!"

"Well, lissen—go to Zed and beg him not to tell, tell him you—you'll give him a—a hunderd dollars never to tell it. I got that much saved up in the bank. Tell him— Oh, but I know he will tell!" She put her hands over her eyes and blindfolded herself in the hot little room.

"Lissen," said Abner hopefully, "all of us fellers, the whole railroad outfit, is agoin' to move out of Arntown an' camp about sixteen miles west o' here—then you'll be shut of Zed."