She shook her head with certainty.  It seemed a lifetime since this boy had kissed her at the dance and she had run, tingling, from his embrace.  She felt now old enough in experience to be his mother.

“No, Tom—­let us both forget it.  Go back to your other girls, and let me be just a friend.”

“I haven’t any other girls,” he answered sullenly.  “And I won’t be put off like that.  You’ve got to tell me what has come between us.  I’ve got a right to know, and I’m going to know.”

“Yes, you have a right—­but don’t press it.  Just let it go at this:  I didn’t know my own mind then, and I do now.”

“It’s something about the shooting of Buck Weaver,” he growled uneasily.

She was silent.

“Well?” he demanded.  “Out with it!”

“I couldn’t marry a man I don’t respect from the bottom of my heart,” she told him gently.

“That’s a dig at me, I reckon.  Why don’t you respect me?  Is it because I shot Weaver?”

“You shot him from ambush.”

“I didn’t!” he protested angrily.  “You know that ain’t so, Phyl.  I saw him riding down there, as big as coffee, and I let him have it.  I wasn’t lying in wait for him at all.  It just came over me all of a heap to shoot, and I shot before——­”

“I understand that.  But you shouldn’t have shot without giving warning, even if it was right to shoot at all—­which, of course, it wasn’t.”

“Well, say I did wrong.  Can’t you forgive a fellow for making a mistake?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness, Tom.  Somehow it goes deeper than that.  I can’t tell you just what I mean.”

“Haven’t I told you I’m sorry?” he demanded, with boyish impatience.

“Being sorry isn’t enough.  If you can’t see it then I can’t explain.”

“You’re sore at me because I left you,” he muttered, and for very shame his eyes could not meet hers.

“No—­I’m not sore at you, as you call it.  I haven’t the least resentment.  But there’s no use in trying to hide the truth.  Since you ask for it, you shall have it.  I don’t want to be unkind, but I couldn’t possibly marry you after that.”

The young man looked sulkily across the valley, his lips trembling with vexation and the shame of knowing that this girl had been a witness of that scene when he had fled like a scared rabbit and left her to bear the brunt of what he had done.

“You told me to go, and now you blame me for doing what you said,” he complained bitterly.

She realized the weakness of his defense—­that he had saved himself at the expense of the girl he claimed to love, simply because she had offered herself as a sacrifice in his place.  She thought of another man, who, at the risk of his life, had held back the half dozen pursuers just to give a better chance to a girl he had not known a week.  She thought of the cattleman who had ridden gayly into this valley of enemies, because he loved her, and was willing