“It is!” she said decisively.

“I’ll be going,” said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal.

“As you please,” answered that easy traveller.  “I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements.”

His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge.  They changed melodrama into comedy.  They made his protagonist appear a negligible quantity.

“There’s some things I don’t do when women are around,” the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed.  The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him.  He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot.

“Huh!  You near-silk dude!” he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.

“If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk,” the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.

“We’ll meet again!” came the more definite and articulate defiance.

“Perhaps.  Who can tell?  Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small.”

Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle.  He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination.

“When we do meet, you better draw!  I give you warning!” he called.

There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle.  But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.

“Whew!” He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.

“Whistle—­whistle while you can!  You won’t have many more chances!  Draw, you tenderfoot!  But it won’t do any good—­I’ll get you!”

With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way.

“Whew!” The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic.  It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.

From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless.

“Well, well,” he concluded, “you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!”