“Stewart, I do not fully understand what you hint that Nels and his comrades might do.  Please be frank with me.  Do you mean Nels would shoot upon little provocation?”

“Miss Hammond, as far as Nels is concerned, shooting is now just a matter of his meeting Don Carlos’s vaqueros.  It’s wonderful what Nels has stood from them, considering the Mexicans he’s already killed.”

“Already killed!  Stewart, you are not in earnest?” cried Madeline, shocked.

“I am.  Nels has seen hard life along the Arizona border.  He likes peace as well as any man.  But a few years of that doesn’t change what the early days made of him.  As for Nick Steele and Monty, they’re just bad men, and looking for trouble.”

“How about yourself, Stewart?  Stillwell’s remark was not lost upon me,” said Madeline, prompted by curiosity.

Stewart did not reply.  He looked at her in respectful silence.  In her keen earnestness Madeline saw beneath his cool exterior and was all the more baffled.  Was there a slight, inscrutable, mocking light in his eyes, or was it only her imagination?  However, the cowboy’s face was as hard as flint.

“Stewart, I have come to love my ranch,” said Madeline, slowly, “and I care a great deal for my—­my cowboys.  It would be dreadful if they were to kill anybody, or especially if one of them should be killed.”

“Miss Hammond, you’ve changed things considerable out here, but you can’t change these men.  All that’s needed to start them is a little trouble.  And this Mexican revolution is bound to make rough times along some of the wilder passes across the border.  We’re in line, that’s all.  And the boys are getting stirred up.”

“Very well, then, I must accept the inevitable.  I am facing a rough time.  And some of my cowboys cannot be checked much longer.  But, Stewart, whatever you have been in the past, you have changed.”  She smiled at him, and her voice was singularly sweet and rich.  “Stillwell has so often referred to you as the last of his kind of cowboy.  I have just a faint idea of what a wild life you have led.  Perhaps that fits you to be a leader of such rough men.  I am no judge of what a leader should do in this crisis.  My cowboys are entailing risk in my employ; my property is not safe; perhaps my life even might be endangered.  I want to rely upon you, since Stillwell believes, and I, too, that you are the man for this place.  I shall give you no orders.  But is it too much to ask that you be my kind of a cowboy?”

Madeline remembered Stewart’s former brutality and shame and abject worship, and she measured the great change in him by the contrast afforded now in his dark, changeless, intent face.

“Miss Hammond, what kind of a cowboy is that?” he asked.