“That’s right good of you.”

Her soft, brown eyes met his again.  They poured upon him the gift of passionate gratitude she could not put into words.  It was from something much more horrible than death that he had snatched her.  One moment she had been a creature crushed, leaden despair in her heart.  Then the miracle had flashed down from the sky.  She was free, astride the pinto, galloping for home.

“Yes, you owe us much.”  There was a note of light sarcasm in her clear, young voice, but the feeling in her heart swept it away in an emotional rush of words from the tongue of her father.  “Vous avez pris le fait et cause pour moi.  Sans vous j’etais perdu.”

“You’re French,” he said.

“My father is, not my mother.  She was from Tennessee.”

“I’m from the South, too.”

“You didn’t need to tell me that,” she answered with a little smile.

“Oh, I’m a Westerner now, but you ought to have heerd me talk when I first came out.”  He broached a grievance.  “Say, will you tell yore dad not to do that again?  I’m no kid.”

“Do what?”

“You know.”  The red flamed into his face.  “If it got out among the boys what he’d done, I’d never hear the last of it.”

“You mean kissed you?”

“Sure I do.  That ain’t no way to treat a fellow.  I’m past eighteen if I am small for my age.  Nobody can pull the pat-you-on-the-head-sonny stuff on me.”

“But you don’t understand.  That isn’t it at all.  My father is French.  That makes all the difference.  When he kissed you it meant—­oh, that he honored and esteemed you because you fought for me.”

“I been tellin’ you right along that Billie Prince is to blame.  Let him go an’ kiss Billie an’ see if he’ll stand for it.”

A flash of roguishness brought out an unexpected dimple near the corner of her insubordinate mouth.  “We’ll be good, all of us, and never do it again.  Cross our hearts.”

Young Clanton reddened beneath the tan.  Without looking at her he felt the look she tilted sideways at him from under the long, curved lashes.  Of course she was laughing at him.  He knew that much, even though he lacked the experience to meet her in kind.  Oddly enough, there pricked through his embarrassment a delicious little tingle of delight.  So long as she took him in as a partner of her gayety she might make as much fun of him as she pleased.

But the owlish dignity of his age would not let him drop the subject without further explanation.  “It’s all right for yore dad to much you.  I reckon a girl kinder runs to kisses an’ such doggoned foolishness.  But a man’s different.  He don’t go in for it.”

“Oh, doesn’t he?” asked Polly demurely.  She did not think it necessary to mention that every unmarried man who came to the ranch wanted to make love to her before he left.  “I’m glad you told me, because I’m only a girl and I don’t know much about it.  And since you’re a man, of course you know.”