“I thought you were anxious for a truce,” she said recklessly, shading a slope so that it looked like the peak of a roof.

“I am,” I retorted shamelessly.  “I’m anxious for anything under the sun that will keep you talking to me.  People might call that a flirtatious remark, but I plead not guilty; I wouldn’t know how to flirt, even if I wanted to do so.”

She turned her head and looked at me in a way that I could not misunderstand; it was plain, unvarnished scorn, and a ladylike anger, and a few other unpleasant things.

It made me think of a certain star in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

    “Fie, fie! unknit that threatening, unkind brow,
    And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
    To wound thy neighbor and thine enemy,”

I declaimed, with rather a free adaptation to my own need.

Her brow positively refused to unknit.  “Have you nothing to do but spout bad quotations from Shakespeare on a hilltop?” she wanted to know, in a particularly disagreeable tone.

“Plenty; I have yet to win that narrow pass,” I said.

“Hardly to-day,” she told me, with more than a shade of triumph.  “Father is at home, and he heard of your trip yesterday.”

If she expected to scare me by that!  “Must our feud include your father?  When I met him a month ago, he gave me a cordial invitation to stop, if I ever happened this way.”

She lifted those heavy lashes, and her eyes plainly spoke unbelief.

“It’s a fact,” I assured her calmly.  “I met him one day in Laurel, and was fortunate enough to perform a service which earned his gratitude.  As I say, he invited me to come and see him; I told him I should be glad to have him visit me at the Bay State Ranch, and we embraced each other with much fervor.”

“Indeed!” I could see that she persisted in doubting my veracity.

“Ask your father if we didn’t,” I said, much injured.  I knew she wouldn’t, though.

A scrambling behind us made me turn, and there was Perry Potter climbing up to us, his eyes sharper than ever, and his face so absolutely devoid of expression that it told me a good deal.  I’ll lay all I own he was a good bit astonished at what he saw!  As for me, I could have kicked him back to the bottom of the hill—­and I probably looked it.

“There was something I forgot to put in that note,” he said evenly, just touching the brim of his hat in acknowledgment of the girl’s presence.  “I wrote another one.  I’d like Ballard to get it as soon as you can make camp—­conveniently.”  His eyes looked through me almost as if I weren’t there.

My desire to kick him grew almost into mania.  I took the note, saw at a glance that it was addressed to me, and said:  “All right,” in a tone quite different from the one I had been using to tease Miss King.

He gave me another sharp look, and went back the way he had come, leaving me standing there glaring after him.  Miss King, I noticed, was sketching for dear life, and her cheeks were crimson.