“Take care,” she warned with a flash of anger in her black eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know.  Why should I cull my words so careful?  I notice yours ain’t hand-picked.  Ever since this guy Beaudry came spying into the park, you’ve had no use for me.  You have been throwing yourself at his head and couldn’t see any one else.”

She gasped.  “How dare you, Brad Charlton?”

His jealousy swept away the prudence that had dammed his anger.  “Didn’t you take him out driving?  Didn’t you spend a night alone with him and Dave Dingwell?  Didn’t you hot-foot it down to Hart’s because you was afraid yore precious spy would meet up with what he deserved?”

Beulah drew up Blacky abruptly.  “Now you can leave me.  Don’t stop to say good-bye.  I hate you.  I don’t ever want to see you again.”

He had gone too far and he knew it.  Sulkily he began to make his apology.  “You know how fond I am of you, Boots.  You know—­”

“Yes, I ought to.  I’ve heard it often enough,” she interrupted curtly.  “That’s probably why you insult me?”

Her gypsy eyes stabbed him.  She was furiously angry.  He attempted to explain.  “Now, listen here, Beulah.  Let’s be reasonable.”

“Are you going up or down?” she demanded.  “I’m going the other way.  Take one road or the other, you—­you scandalmonger.”

Never a patient man, he too gave rein to his anger.  “Since you want to know, I’m going down—­to Battle Butte, where I’ll likely meet yore friend Beaudry and settle an account or two with him.  I reckon before I git through with him he’ll yell something besides Cornell.”

The girl laughed scornfully.  “Last time I saw him he had just beaten a dozen or so of you.  How many friends are you going to take along this trip?”

Already her horse was taking the trail.  She called the insult down to him over her shoulder.  But before she had gone a half-mile her eyes were blind with tears.  Why did she get so angry?  Why did she say such things?  Other girls were ladylike and soft-spoken.  Was there a streak of commonness in her that made possible such a scene as she had just gone through?  In her heart she longed to be a lady—­gentle, refined, sweet of spirit.  Instead of which she was a bad-tempered tomboy.  “Miss Spitfire” her brothers sometimes called her, and she knew the name was justified.

Take this quarrel now with Brad.  She had had no intention of breaking with him in that fashion.  Why couldn’t she dismiss a lover as girls in books do, in such a way as to keep him for a friend?  She had not meant, anyhow, to bring the matter to issue to-day.  One moment they had been apparently the best of comrades.  The next they had been saying hateful things to each other.  What he had said was unforgivable, but she had begun by accusing him of complicity in the train robbery.  Knowing how arrogant he was, she might have guessed how angry criticism would make him.