“Sorry.  I’m awfully awkward,” he apologized.

Again an angry flush stained her cheeks.  The stupidity had been hers, not his.  She resented it that he was ready to take the blame,—­read into his manner a condescension he did not at all feel.

“I know whose fault it was.  I’m not a fool,” she snapped brusquely.

It added to her irritation at making such an exhibition of clumsiness that she was one of the best horsewomen in the Territory.  Her life had been an outdoor one, and she had stuck to the saddle on the back of many an outlaw bronco without pulling leather.  There were many things of which she knew nothing.  The ways of sophisticated women, the conventions of society, were alien to her life.  She was mountain-bred, brought up among men, an outcast even from the better class of Battle Butte.  But the life of the ranch she knew.  That this soft-cheeked boy from town should think she did not know how to get on a horse was a little too humiliating.  Some day, if she ever got a chance, she would let him see her vault into the saddle without touching the stirrups.

The young man walking beside the horse might still be smooth-cheeked, but he had the muscles of an athlete.  He took the hills with a light, springy step and breathed easily after stiff climbing.  His mind was busy making out what manner of girl this was.  She was new to his experience.  He had met none like her.  That she was a proud, sulky creature he could easily guess from her quickness at taking offense.  She resented even the appearance of being ridiculous.  Her acceptance of his favors carried always the implication that she hated him for offering them.  It was a safe guess that back of those flashing eyes were a passionate temper and an imperious will.

It was evident that she knew the country as a teacher knows the primer through which she leads her children.  In daylight or in darkness, with or without a trail, she could have followed almost an air-line to the ranch.  The paths she took wound in and out through unsuspected gorges and over divides that only goats or cow-ponies could have safely scrambled up and down.  Hidden pockets had been cached here so profusely by nature that the country was a maze.  A man might have found safety from pursuit in one of these for a lifetime if he had been provisioned.

“Where were you going when you found me?” the young woman asked.

“Up to the mountain ranches of Big Creek.  I was lost, so we ought to put it that you found me,” Beaudry answered with the flash of a pleasant smile.

“What are you going to do up there?” Her keen suspicious eyes watched him warily.

“Sell windmills if I can.  I’ve got the best proposition on the market.”

“Why do you come away up here?  Don’t you know that the Big Creek headwaters are off the map?”

“That’s it exactly,” he replied.  “I expect no agents get up here.  It’s too hard to get in.  I ought to be able to sell a whole lot easier than if I took the valleys.”  He laughed a little, by way of taking her into his confidence.  “I’ll tell the ranchers that if they buy my windmills it will put Big Creek on the map.”