Weary wondered how Irish got mixed up in a deal like that, which somehow did not seem to be in line with his character.  And he wished, a bit vindictively, that this Spikes Weber could meet Irish.  He rather thought that Spikes needed the chastening effects of such a meeting.  Weary, while not in the least quarrelsome on his own account, was ever the staunch defender of a friend.

Just where another brown trail branched off and wandered away over a hill to the east, a woman rode out and met him face to face.  She pulled up and gave a little cry that brought Weary involuntarily to a halt.

“You!” she exclaimed, in a tone that Weary felt he had no right to hear from any but his little schoolma’am.  “But I knew you’d come back when you heard I—­Have—­have you seen Spikes, Ira?”

Weary flushed embarrassment; this was no joke.  “No,” he stammered, in some doubt just how to proceed.  “The fact is, you’ve made a little mistake.  I’m not—­”

“Oh, you needn’t go on,” she interrupted, and her voice, had Weary known it better, heralded the pouring out of a woman’s heart.  “I know I’ve made a mistake, all right; you don’t need to tell me that.  And I suppose you want to tell me that you’ve got over—­things; that you don’t care, any more.  Maybe you don’t, but it’ll take a lot to make me believe it.  Because you did care, Ira.  You cared, all right enough!” She laughed in the way that makes one very uncomfortable.

“And maybe you’ll tell me that I didn’t.  But I did, and I do yet.  I ain’t ashamed to say it, if I did marry Spikes Weber just to spite you.  That’s all it was, and you’d have found it out if you hadn’t gone off the way you did.  I hate Spikes Weber; and he knows it, Ira.  He knows I—­care—­for you, and he’s making my life a hell.  Oh, maybe I deserve it—­but you won’t—­ Now you’ve come back, you can have it out with him; and I—­I almost hope you’ll kill him!  I do, and I don’t care if it is wicked.  I—­I don’t care for anything much, but—­you.”  She had big, soft brown eyes, and a sweet, weak mouth, and she stopped and looked at Weary in a way that he could easily imagine would be irresistible—­to a man who cared.

Weary felt that he was quite helpless.  She had hurried out sentences that sealed his lips.  He could not tell her now that she had made a mistake; that he was not Ira Mallory, but a perfect stranger.  The only thing to do now was to carry the thing through as tactfully as possible, and get away as soon as he could.  Playing he was Irish, he found, was not without its disadvantages.

“What particular brand of hell has he been making for you?” he asked her sympathetically.

“I wouldn’t think, knowing Spikes as you do, you’d need to ask,” she said impatiently.  “The same old brand, I guess.  He gets drunk, and then—­I told him, right out, just after we were married, that I liked you the best, and he don’t forget it; and he don’t let me.  He swears he’ll shoot you on sight—­as if that would do any good!  He hates you, Ira.”  She laughed again unpleasantly.