The man’s face looked sternly out from under his wide hat.  He felt a great responsibility for the girl since he had seen the face of the man who was pursuing her.

Their horses were fresh, and the day was fine.  They rode hard as long as the road was smooth, and did little talking.  The girl was turning over in her mind the words the woman had spoken to her.  But the thing that stuck there and troubled her was, “And he knows it is so.”

Was she doing something for which this man by her side would not respect her?  Was she overstepping some unwritten law of which she had never heard, and did he know it, and yet encourage her in it?

That she need fear him in the least she would not believe.  Had she not watched the look of utmost respect on his face as he stood quietly waiting for her to awake the first morning they had met?  Had he not had opportunity again and again to show her dishonor by word or look?  Yet he had never been anything but gentle and courteous to her.  She did not call things by these names, but she felt the gentleman in him.

Besides, there was the lady.  He had told about her at the beginning.  He evidently honored the lady.  The woman had said that the lady would not ride with him alone.  Was it true?  Would he not like to have the lady ride alone with him when she was not his relative in any way?  Then was there a difference between his thought of the lady and of herself?  Of course, there was some; he loved the lady, but he should not think less honorably of her than of any lady in the land.

She sat straight and proudly in her man’s saddle, and tried to make him feel that she was worthy of respect.  She had tried to show him this when she had shot the bird.  Now she recognized that there was a fine something, higher than shooting or prowess of any kind, which would command respect.  It was something she felt belonged to her, yet she was not sure she commanded it.  What did she lack, and how could she secure it?

He watched her quiet, thoughtful face, and the lady of his former troubled thoughts was as utterly forgotten by him as if she had never existed.  He was unconsciously absorbed in the study of eye and lip and brow.  His eyes were growing accustomed to the form and feature of this girl beside him, and he took pleasure in watching her.

They stopped for lunch in a coulee under a pretty cluster of cedar-trees a little back from the trail, where they might look over the way they had come and be warned against pursuers.  About three o’clock they reached a town.  Here the railroad came directly from Malta, but there was but one train a day each way.

The man went to the public stopping-place and asked for a room, and boldly demanded a private place for his “sister” to rest for a while.  “She is my little sister,” he told himself in excuse for the word.  “She is my sister to care for.  That is, if she were my sister, this is what I should want some good man to do for her.”