Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.

“Don’t forget the name of his pony!” she called merrily from the stairs.  “It’s P.D.”

“P.D.!” said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good morsel which he finds tasteless.  “There he seems to have descended to alphabetic commonplace.  No imagery in that!”

“He is a slow, reliable pony,” put in Mary, “without the Q.”

“Pretty Damn, without the Quick!  Oh, I know slang!”

Jasper Ewold burst into laughter.  It was still echoing through the house when she entered her room.  As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was its most pronounced characteristic.

Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought.  It had been an overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over logic.  She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it was so late.  But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night.  What folly!  What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life!  But was it folly?  What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event!  Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain.  Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper.  She was wroth about the coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.

She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three.  And he, on his part—­this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life and evidently set old passions afire in her father’s mind—­of course he was sleeping!  That was the exasperating phlegm of him.  He would sleep on horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!

“A smile and a square chin—­and dreamy vagueness,” she kept repeating.

The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind.  Then Pete Leddy’s final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield’s attitude in answer rose out of the pantomime in merciless clearness.

All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed impressions was gone.  She got a message, abruptly and convincingly.  This incident of the pass was not closed.  An ultimatum had been exchanged.  Death lay between these two men.  Jack had accepted the issue.