Pretty girls had come his way now and again during his wanderings north and south and east and west through the mountain deserts.  But never before had he seen one in such a background.  She had had the good taste to make the inside of the house well-nigh as Spanish as its exterior.  There were cool, dim spaces in the big rooms; and here and there were bright spots of color.  Her very costume for the evening showed the same discrimination.  She wore drab riding clothes.  But from her own garden she had chosen a scentless blossom of a kind which Red Perris had never seen before.  The absent charm of perfume was turned into a deeper coloring, a crimson intense as fire in the darkness of her hair.  That one touch of color, and no more, but it gave wonderful warmth to her eyes and to her smile.

And indeed she was not sparing in her smiles.  Red Jim Perris pleased her, and she was not afraid to show it.  To be sure, she talked of the business before them, but she talked of it only in scattered phrases.  Other topics drew her away.  A score of little side-issues carried her away.  And Jim Perris was glad of the diversions.

For the only thing which he disliked in her, the only thing which repelled him time and again, was this eagerness of hers to have the chestnut stallion killed.  She spoke of Alcatraz with a consuming hatred.  And Perris was a little horrified.  He knew that Alcatraz had stolen away the six mares, and Marianne explained briefly and eloquently how much the return of those mares meant to her self-respect and to the financial soundness of the ranch.  But this, after all, was a small excuse for an ugly passion.  If he could have known that with her own eyes she had seen the chestnut crush Cordova to shapelessness and almost to death, the mystery might have been cleared.  But Marianne could not refer to that terrible memory.  All she could say was that Alcatraz must be killed—­at once!  And she said it with her eyes on fire with detestation.

Indeed, that touch of angry passion in her was the flower of Hermes to Red Jim, keeping him from complete infatuation when she sang to him, playing her own lightly-touched accompaniment at the piano.  He had never been entertained like this before.  And when a girl sang a love ballad and at the same time looked at him with eyes at once serious and laughing, he had to set his teeth and shake himself to keep from taking the words of the poet too literally.  Perhaps Marianne was going a little farther than she intended.  But after all, every good woman has a tremendous desire to make men happy, and handsome Jim Perris with his straight, steady eyes and his free laughter was such a pleasant fellow to work with that Marianne quite forgot moderation.

And before the evening was over, Jim had come within a hair’s breadth of plunging over the cliff and confessing his admiration in terms so outright that Marianne would have closed up her charming gaiety as a flower closes up its beauty and fragrance at the first warning chill of night.  A dozen times Red Perris came to this alarming point, but he was always saved by remembering that this delightful girl had brought him here for the purpose of—­killing a horse.  And that memory chilled Jim to the very core of his manly heart.