“I wanted to get fixed up,” he said, “but the note said to come right after the race—­Miss Jordan.”

In fact he made a harum-scarum figure.  The fight with him of the moustaches had produced rents invisible at a distance but distinct at close hand and the dust and the sweat had faded the blue of his shirt and the red of his bandana.  But the red flame of that hair and the keen blue of that eye—­they, to be sure, were not faded.  She discovered other things as he crossed the room to her.  That he was far shorter than he had seemed when he fought in the street.  Indeed, he was middle height and slenderly made at that.  She felt that looking at him from her window and watching him ride Rickety she had only seen the spirit of the man and not the physical fact at all.

He shook hands.  She was glad to see that he neither peered at her slyly as a vain man is apt to do when he meets a girl who has sought him out nor met her sullenly as is the habit of the bashful Westerner.  His head was high, his glance straight, and his smile appreciated her with frank enjoyment.

She tried to match her speech with his outright demeanor:  “I have a business offer to make.  I won’t take a great deal of your time.  Ten minutes will do.  Won’t you sit down, Mr. Perris?”

She took his tattered hat and pointed out a seat to him, noting, as she herself sat down, that he was as erect in his chair as he had been standing.  There was something so adventurously restless about Red Perris that she thought of a thoroughbred fresh from the stable; just as a blooded hunter is apt to be “too much horse under the saddle,” so she was inclined to feel that Perris was “too much man.”  Something about him was always moving.  Either his lean fingers fretted on the arm of the chair, or his foot stirred, or his glance flickered, or his head turned proudly.  Going back to the thoroughbred comparison she decided that Perris badly needed to have a race or two under his belt before he would be worked down to normal.  She noted another thing:  at close hand he was more handsome.

In the meantime, since she had to talk, it would be pleasanter to find some indirect approach.  One was offered by the fob which hung outside the watchpocket of his trousers.  It was a tarnished, misshapen lump of metal.

“I can’t help asking about that fob,” she said.  “I’ve never seen one even remotely like it.”

He fingered it with a singular smile.

“Tell you about it,” he said amiably enough.  “I was standing by looking at a large-sized fracas one day and me doing nothing—­just as peaceful as an old plough-hoss—­when a gent ups and drills me in the leg.  His bullet had to cut through my holster and then it jammed into my thigh bone.  Put me in bed for a couple of months and when I got out I had the slug fixed up for a fob.  Just so’s I could remember the man that shot me.  That’s about five years back.  I ain’t found him yet, but I’m still remembering, you see?”