“Want you to shut up and pay attention to me!” she flung back.  “I thought you was gonna leave town.  Why ain’t you?”

“Changed my mind,” was his answer.

“Why can’t you do what you said you’d do?” She was quite vehement about it.

“I got a right to change my mind, ain’t I?”

“Go, dammit!  Why can’t you go?  You gave them a chance to even up when you ran that blazer on Doc Coffin an’ Honey Hoke there in the Starlight.  Let it go at that.  Whadda you want to hang round here for?  Don’t you know that every hour you stay here makes it more dangerous for you?...  Oh, you can laugh!  That’s all you do when a feller does her level best to see you don’t come to any harm.  Gawd!  I could shake you for a fool!”

“Was that what you pulled me alla way over here to tell me?” he inquired, somewhat miffed at her acerbity.

“I pulled you across the street because if I’d left you where I found you you wouldn’t ‘a’ lived a minute.”  The starlight was bright enough to reveal to him the set and earnest tenseness of her features.

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ lived a minute, huh?” was his comment.  “I didn’t see anybody round there fit and able to put in a period.”

“It wasn’t anybody you could see.  Don’t you remember what I said about a knife in the night, or a shot in the dark?  Man, do you have to be killed before you’re convinced?”

“Well—­uh—­I—­”

“Whadda you guess I was standin’ alongside of you for while you was talkin’ to that other feller, huh?  Tryin’ to listen to what you was sayin’?  Think so, huh?”

“You shore had yore nerve,” he said, admiringly—­and helplessly.

“Nerve nothin’!” she denied.  “He wouldn’t shoot through me.  I know that well enough.”

“Why wouldn’t he?  And how do you know?”

“Because, and I do.  That’s enough.”

“Which particular one is he?”

“I ain’t sayin’.”

“Do you like him as much as that?” Shrewdly.

“Not the way you mean.”  Dispassionately.

“Then who is he?”

“I ain’t sayin’, I tell you!”

“You snitched on Nebraska.”  Persuasively.

“This feller’s different.”

“How different?”

“None of yore business.  Lookit, I’m doin’ my best for you, but I won’t have the luck every time that I had to-night—­nor you won’t, neither.  Gawd! if I hadn’t just happened to strike for a night off this evenin’ I dunno where you’d be!”

“Say, I thought you didn’t dare let them see you have anythin’ to do with me?”

“I didn’t, and I don’t.  But I had to.  I couldn’t set by an’ let you be plugged, could I?  Hardly.”

“But—­”

“’Tsall right, ’tsall right.  Don’t you worry any about me.  I got a ace in the hole if the weather gets wet.  But I wanna tell you this:  If yo’re bound to go on playin’ the fool, keep a-movin’ and walk round a lighted window like it’s a swamp.”