His guess was correct.  Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes’s easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity.  Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain pattern.  Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven abortive.  Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest shifting of an eye had he given sign.  Still convinced that he was the mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an unknown and formidable species.  The man who had transformed self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her marriage, must be something out of the ordinary.  Instinct of womankind told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such a miracle.

“But you did know Io?” she persisted, feeling, as she afterward confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.

The lion did not bite her head off.  He did not even roar.  He merely said, “Yes.”

“In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?”

“Something of that sort.”

“Are you awfully bored and wishing I’d go away and let you alone?” she said, on a note that pleaded for forbearance.  “Because if you are, don’t make such heroic efforts to conceal it.”

At this an almost imperceptible twist at the corners of his lips manifested itself to the watchful eye and cheered the enterprising soul of Miss Forbes.  “No,” he said equably, “I’m interested to discover how far you’ll go.”

The snub left Miss Forbes unembarrassed.

“Oh, as far as you’ll let me,” she answered.  “Did you ride in from your ranch and drag Io out of the tangled wreckage at the end of your lasso?”

“My ranch?  I wasn’t on a ranch.”

“Please, sir,” she smiled up at him like a beseeching angel, “what did you do that kept us all talking and speculating about you for a whole week, though we didn’t know your name?”

“I sat right on my job as station-agent at Manzanita and made up lists of the killed and injured,” answered Banneker dryly.

“Station-agent!” The girl was taken aback, for this was not at all in consonance with the Io myth as it had drifted back, from sources never determined, to New York.  “Were you the station-agent?”

“I was.”

She bestowed a glance at once appraising and flattering, less upon himself than upon his apparel.  “And what are you now?  President of the road?”

“A reporter on The Ledger.”

“Really!” This seemed to astonish her even more than the previous information.  “What are you reporting here?”