While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch.  It was only blood, she told herself.  It would wash off, and she held her hands in the water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of preoccupation.  Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on removing the skin itself.  After she had held up her dripping fingers in satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye.  For a moment they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown precipitately.

With this, her determined haste was at an end.  She was about to enjoy the feminine luxury of time.  The combing of her hair became a delightful and leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and the refreshing pull at the roots.  The flow of the bath water made the music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of physical life leaping and tingling in her veins.  And all the while she was thinking of how to fashion a narrative.

When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade.  She was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of ushering herself from the night’s rest into the day’s activities.  There had been no stealthy trip out to the arroyo; no duel; no wound; no Senor Don’t Care.  She had only a story which involved all these elements, a most preposterous story, to tell.

“Now you shall hear all about it!” she called to her father as soon as she saw him; “the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair”—­she piled up the adjectives—­“that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!”

She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle high-pitched with her simulation of humor.  And she was exactly veracious, avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant trail.  She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack’s whistle; of Pete’s challenge.

Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness.  He did not laugh, even when Jack’s vagaries were mentioned.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” was his first question.

“To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you.  I was afraid that you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again.  But you will?” She slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in bronze welts.  “And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs fashion.  He said that it was all due to the whistle.”

“Go on!  Go on!  There must be more!” her father insisted impatiently.

She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy—­she was careful about that—­but as something witnessed by an impersonal spectator and narrator of stories.

“He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?” Jasper asked, his brows contracting.