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 likely to be killed here to-day. I think your father's right. Home is the place for you, Elizabeth."

"What are you going to do?" she inquired, lifting her anxious eyes. "You haven't got any gun."

"It isn't my fight, Elizabeth," he replied gently, meeting her questioning glance steadily. He touched her hand where it pressed the books. She drew it away, subconsciously, it seemed, shaking her head.

"It's everybody's fight to-day," she said.

"I'm an outsider," he reminded her, "but Damascus doesn't appear to be a respecter of persons in its brawls. It has reached out and involved the innocent bystander before; it may do it again. If anything like that happens I'll have to act on the impulse. That's all I can say, Elizabeth."

"But you haven't got a gun," she insisted, in a half complaining, half blaming way.

"I'll make out without one," he replied, somewhat stiffly, his dignity touched by her manner of indictment for what she too plainly believed his remission in a manly duty.

"It's suicide to meet that Simrall crowd without a gun," she continued her censorious arraignment. "I've always told you a man couldn't face the music in this country without a gun, and now you'll see I'm right. Rustle around and get one, can't you, before they come?"

"That would spot me at once as an enemy to Simrall, which I'm not," he replied, disloyally, she believed, as the the sudden flush of her cheeks gave token.

"I shouldn't think you'd want somebody else to do your shooting for you all the time," she rebuked him, a