He came in and she closed the door.

“I’m sopping wet.  I’ll drip all over the floor.”

“What are you going to do?  You’ll be arrested, you know.”  She stood straight and slim as a boy, and the frank directness of her gaze had a boy’s sexless unconsciousness.

“Thought I’d give myself up to the marshal.”

She laughed outright at this.  “Not in this town.  A stranger like you would have no chance.  Listen.”  There came to them from outside the tap-tap-tap-tap of a policeman’s night stick rattling on the curbstone.  “He’s calling help.”

“I can explain how it happened.”

“No.  He wouldn’t understand.  They’d find you guilty.”

He moved from the rug where he was standing to let the water drip on the hardwood floor.

“Sho!  Folks are mostly reasonable.  I’d tell the judge how it come about.”

“No.”

“Well, I can’t stay here.”

“Yes—­till they’ve gone.”

Her imperative warmed his heart, but he tried to explain gently why he could not.  “I can’t drag you into this.  Like as not the Swede saw me come in.”

To a manservant standing in the background the young woman spoke.  “Jenkins, have Nora clean up the floor and the steps outside.  And remember—­I don’t want the police to know this gentleman is here.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Come!” said the girl to her guest.  She led Clay to the massive stairway, but stopped at the first tread to call back an order over her shoulder.  “Refer the officers to me if they insist on coming into the house.”

“I’ll see to it, Miss.”

Clay followed his hostess to the stairs and went up them with her, but he went protesting, though with a chuckle of mirth.  “He sure ruined my clothes a heap.  I ain’t fit to be seen.”

The suit he had been so proud of was shrinking so that his arms and legs stuck out like signposts.  The color had run and left the goods a peculiar bilious-looking overall blue.

She lit a gas-log in a small library den.

“Just a minute, please.”

She stepped briskly from the room.  In her manner was a crisp decision, in her poise a trim gallantry that won him instantly.

“I’ll bet she’d do to ride with,” he told himself in a current Western idiom.

When she came back it was to take him to a dressing-room.  A complete change of clothing was laid out for him on a couch.  A man whom Clay recognized as a valet—­he had seen his duplicate in the moving-picture theaters at Tucson—­was there to supply his needs and attend to the temperature of his bath.

“Stevens will look after you,” she said; “when you are ready come back to Dad’s den.”

His eyes followed to the door her resilient step.  Once, when he was a boy, he had seen Ada Rehan play in “As You Like It.”  Her acting had entranced him.  This girl carried him back to that hour.  She was boyish as Rosalind, woman in every motion of her slim and lissom body.