“I’m sorry,” she said.  And even in her trouble there was a coldness in her tone no less than his.

Bull choked down his feelings.

“Please don’t go,” he cried, urgently.  “It would please me very much to have that message sent.  Say, I wasn’t thinking the way you reckoned.  I wasn’t thinking of the message at all.”

“Then you will read it?” The girl came back readily.

“Why should I?” Bull asked smilingly.  “Say, a friend asking me to send a message for him, a message no concern of mine, what would you think, what would he feel, if I demanded to read its contents?”

He ran the fingers of one hand through his mane of hair and stood smiling down into the girl’s pretty eyes.

“You know this thing makes me want to talk.  I’ve just got to talk.  The position’s sort of impossible as it stands.  Maybe you don’t guess the thing I’m feeling, and maybe I don’t just know how it is with you.  We’ve got to talk right out and show down our hands.  If we don’t—­”

He turned away and glanced out of window.  Then his eyes came back claimed by the magnetism which the girl exercised.

“You know, Nancy, our war is over.  The war between you and me.  We declared war, didn’t we?  We declared it in Quebec, and we both promised to do our best, or—­worst.  It was a sort of compact.  We made it meaning it, and understanding the meaning of it.  If you got the drop on me you were to use it.  The same with me.  It was one of those friendly things, between friends, which might easily mean life or death.  We knew that, and were ready to stand just for whatever came along.  Well, we fought our battle.  It’s over.  It’s done.  Now for God’s sake let’s forget it.  It’s easy for me.  You see, I’m a rough, hard sort of product of these forests that doesn’t worry with scruples and things.  I’m not a woman who’s full of the notions belonging to her sex.  I can wipe the whole thing out of my mind.  I can feel glad for the scrap you put up.  I can think one hell of a great piece of you for it.  Maybe it’s different with you, being a woman.  I guess it’s not going to be easy forgiving the way I had to handle you back out there on the trail.  Or the way you were forced to live our camp life on the way down here.  Or how I’ve had to hold you prisoner in a rough household of rougher men.  I get all that.  I know the thing it is to a woman.  All it means.  Still, it must have been plain to you the chances of that sort of thing before you started in.  That is if I was worth my salt as a fighter.  Well, can you kind of forgive it?  Can’t you try to forget?  Can’t you figger the whole darn thing’s past and done with, and we’re back at where we were in those days in Quebec, when you didn’t hate me to death, and felt good taking dinner in my company?  Say, do you remember the old Myra you’ll soon be boarding again?  You remember our talk on the deck, when the howling gale hit us?  We were talking of the sense of