“I’m afraid to face him.”

That, indeed, brought her head up and let him see all of her rage translated into cruel scorn.

“Really afraid?  I don’t suppose I should be surprised.”

He accepted that badgering as martyrs accept the anguish of fire.

“I’m afraid that if I turn around and see him, Miss Jordan, I ain’t going to stop at words.”

The foreman acted before she could speak.  The laughter across the patio had stopped at Perris’ speech; plainly Hervey must not remain quiescent.  He dropped his big hand on the shoulder of Perris.

“Look here, bucco,” he growled, “You’re tolerable much of a kid to use man-sized talk.  Turn around.”

He even drew Perris slightly towards him, but the latter persisted facing the girl even though his words were for the foreman.  She was growing truly frightened.

“Tell Hervey to take his hand off me,” said the horse-breaker.  “He’s old enough to know better!”

If his words needed amplification it could be found in the wolfish malevolence of his lean face or in the tremor which shook him; the thin space of a thought divided him from action.  Marianne sprang from her chair.  She knew enough of Hervey to understand that he could not swallow this insult in the presence of his cowpunchers.  She knew also by the sudden compression of his lips and the white line about them that her foreman felt himself to be no match for this tigerish fighter.  She thrust between them.  Even in her excitement she noticed that Hervey’s hand came readily from the shoulder of Perris.  The older man stepped back with his hand on his gun, but in a burst of pitying comprehension she knew that it was the courage of hopelessness.  She swung about on Perris, all her control gone, and the bitterness of a thousand aggravations and all her failures on the ranch poured out in words.

“I know your kind and despise it.  You practice with your guns getting ready for your murders which you call fair fights.  Fair fights!  As well race a thoroughbred against a cowpony!  You wrong a man and then bully him.  That’s Western fair play!  But I swear to you, Mr. Perris, that if you so much as touch your weapon I’ll have my men run you down and whip you out of the mountains!”

Her outbreak gave him, singularly, a more even poise.  There was never a fighter who was not a nervous man; there was never a fighter who in a crisis was not suddenly calm.

“Lady,” he answered, “you think you know the West, but you don’t.  If me and Hervey fell out there wouldn’t be a man yonder across the patio that’d lift a hand till the fight was done.  That ain’t the Western way.”

He had spoken much more than he was assured of.  He had even sensed, behind him, the rising of the cowpunchers as the girl talked but at this appeal to their spirit of fair-play they settled down again.

He went on, speaking so that every man in the patio could hear:  “If I won, they might tackle me one by one and we’d have it out till a better man beat me fair and square.  But mobs don’t jump one man, lady—­not around these parts unless he’s stole a hoss!”