In vain Lizzie fought for her control; her lip trembled and her voice shook.

“I hate you, Sue!”

“Sue, ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” pleaded the mother.

“No, I ain’t!  Think of it; here’s Ralph been sweet on Liz for two years an’ now she gives him the go-by for a skinny, affected dude like that feller that was here.  And he’s forgot you already, Liz, the minute he stopped laughing at you for bein’ so easy.”

“Ma, are you goin’ to let Sue talk like this—­right before a stranger?”

“Sue, you shut up!” commanded the father.

“I don’t see nobody that can make me,” she said, surly as a grown boy.  “I can’t make any more of a fool out of Liz than that tenderfoot made her!”

“Did he,” asked Steve, “ride a piebald mustang?”

“D’you know him?” breathed Lizzie, forgetting the tears of shame which had been gathering in her eyes.

“Nope.  Jest heard a little about him along the road.”

“What’s his name?”

Then she coloured, even before Sue could say spitefully:  “Didn’t he even have to tell you his name before he kissed you?”

“He did!  His name is—­Tony!”

“Tony!”—­in deep disgust.  “Well, he’s dark enough to be a dago!  Maybe he’s a foreign count, or something, Liz, and he’ll take you back to live in some castle or other.”

But the girl queried, in spite of this badinage:  “Do you know his name?”

“His name,” said Nash, thinking that it could do no harm to betray as much as this, “is Anthony Bard, I think.”

“And you don’t know him?”

“All I know is that the feller who used to own that piebald mustang is pretty mad and cusses every time he thinks of him.”

“He didn’t steal the hoss?”

This with more bated breath than if the question had been:  “He didn’t kill a man?” for indeed horse-stealing was the greater crime.

Even Nash would not make such an accusation directly, and therefore he fell back on an innuendo almost as deadly.

“I dunno,” he said non-committally, and shrugged his shoulders.

With all his soul he was concentrating on the picture of the man who conquered a fighting horse and flirted successfully with a pretty girl the same day; each time riding on swiftly from his conquest.  The clues on this trail were surely thick enough, but they were of such a nature that the pleasant mind of Steve grew more and more thoughtful.

CHAPTER XIV

LEMONADE

In fact, so thoughtful had Nash become, that he slept with extraordinary lightness that night and was up at the first hint of day.  Sue appeared on the scene just in time to witness the last act of the usual drama of bucking on the part of the roan, before it settled down to the mechanical dog-trot with which it would wear out the ceaseless miles of the mountain-desert all day and far into the night, if need be.