“Nope,” laughed the other.  “It ain’t a dance.  It’s a pile more fun.  Come on you—­”

The big man obscured the last of the insulting description of his ancestry with the rush of a bull, his head lowered and his fists doing duty as horns.  Plainly the giant had only to get one blow home to end the conflict, but swift and graceful as a tongue of fire dancing along a log the red-headed man flashed to one side, and as he whirled Marianne saw that he was laughing still, drunk with the joy of battle.  Goliath roared past, thrashing the air; David swayed in with darting fists.  They closed.  They became obscure forms whirling in a fog of dust until red-head leaped out of the mist.

Goliath followed with the cloud boiling away from him, a mountain of a man above his foeman.

“It’s unfair!” shrilled Marianne.  “That great brute and—­”

Red-head darted forward, a blue clad arm flicked out.  She almost heard and felt the jar of that astonishing shock which halted Goliath in his tracks with one foot raised.  He wobbled an instant, then his great knees bent, and dropping inert on his face the dust spurted like steam under the impact.

The crowd now washed in from every side to lift him up and revive him with canteens of water, yet they were quite jovial in the midst of their work of mercy and Marianne gathered that the fall of Goliath was not altogether unwelcome to the townsmen.  She saw the bulky figure raised to a sitting posture, saw a dull-eyed face, bloody about the mouth, and looked away hastily towards the red-headed victor.

He was in the act of picking the torn fragments of his sombrero from the dust.  It had probably come in contact with the giant’s spurs as they wrestled, for the crown was literally ripped to tatters.  And when its owner beat out the dirt and placed the hat on his head, the fiery hair was still visible through the rents.  Yet he was not downhearted, it seemed.  He leaned jauntily against a hitching post under her window and rolled a cigarette, quite withdrawn from the crowd which was working over his victim.

Marianne began to feel that all she had seen was an ordinary chapter in his life; yet in the mere crossing of that street he had lost his spurs on a bet; saved a youngster from death at the risk of his own head, battled with a monster and now rolled a cigarette cheerily complacent.  If fifty feet of his life made such a story what must a year of it be?

As though he felt her wonder above him, he raised his head in the act of lighting his cigarette and Marianne was looking down into bright, whimsical blue eyes.  She was utterly unconscious of it at the moment but at the sight of that happy face and all the dust-dimmed finery of the cavalier, Marianne involuntarily smiled.  She knew what she had done the moment he grinned in response and began to whistle, and whistle he did, keeping the rhythm with the sway of his head: 

  “At the end of the trail I’ll be weary riding
  But Mary will wait with a smile at the door;
  The spurs and the bit had been chinking and chiding
  But the end of the trail—­”