“She’s sure got some devil in her,” he laughed appreciatively, and he cracked another walnut.

Already he had struck the steel of her quality.  She would be his prisoner because she must, but the “no compromise” flag was nailed to her masthead.

“I wonder why you are so fond of me?” he mused aloud next day when he found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.

He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full length at supple ease.  Leaning on an elbow, he had been watching her for some time.

Her gaze was on the distant line of hills; on her face that far-away expression which told him that he was not on the map for her.  Used as he was to impressing himself upon the imagination of women, this stung his vanity sharply.  He liked better the times when her passion flamed out at him.

Now he lost his sardonic mockery in a flash of anger.

“Do you hear me?  I asked you a question.”

She brought her head round until her eyes rested upon him.

“Will you ask it again, please?  I wasn’t listening.”

“I want to know what makes you hate me so,” he demanded roughly.

“Do I hate you?”

He laughed irritably.  “What else do you call it?  You won’t hardly eat at the same table with me.  Last night you wouldn’t come down to supper.  Same way this morning.  If I sit down near you, soon you find an excuse to leave.  When I speak, you don’t answer.”

“You are my jailer, not my friend.”

“I might be both.”

“No, thank you!”

She said it with such quick, instinctive certainty that he ground his teeth in resentment.  He was the kind of man that always wanted what he could not get.  He began to covet this girl mightily, even while he told himself that he was a fool for his pains.  What was she but an untaught, country schoolgirl?  It would be a strange irony of fate if Buck Weaver should fall in love with a sheepman’s daughter.

“Many people would go far to get my friendship,” he told her.

Quietly she looked at him.  “The friends of my people are my friends.  Their enemies are mine.”

“Yet you said you didn’t hate me.”

“I thought I did, but I find I don’t.”

“Not worth hating, I suppose?”

She neither corrected nor rejected his explanation.

He touched his wounded arm as he went on:  “If you don’t hate me, why this compliment to me?  I reckon good, genuine hate sent that bullet.”

The girl colored, but after a moment’s hesitation answered: 

“Once I shot a coyote when I saw it making ready to pounce on one of our lambs.  I did not hate that coyote.”

“Thank you,” he told her ironically.

Her gaze went back to the mountains.  She had always had a capacity for silence.  But it was as extraordinary to her as to him how, in the past few days, she had sloughed the shy timidity of a mountain girl and found the enduring courage of womanhood.  Her wits, too, had taken on the edge of maturity.  He found that her tongue could strike swiftly and sharply.  She was learning to defend herself in all the ways women have acquired by inheritance.