“I’m not comparing you.  I’m merely saying that you can’t judge her.  How could you, when your life has been so different?”

“Thank Heaven for that.”

“If you’d let me bring her here to see you—­”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re unjust.”

“You think so?”

“And unkind.  That’s not like the little friend I’ve come to—­like so much.”

“You’re kind enough for two, Mr. Lindsay.  She really doesn’t need another friend so long as she has you,” she retorted with a flash of contemptuous eyes.  “In New York we’re not used to being so kind to people of her sort.”

Clay lifted a hand.  “Stop right there, Miss Beatrice.  You don’t want to say anything you’ll be sorry for.”

“I’ll say this,” she cut back.  “The men I know wouldn’t invite a woman to their rooms at midnight and pass her off as their sister—­and then expect people to know her.  They would be kinder to themselves—­and to their own reputations.”

She was striking out savagely, relentlessly, in spite of the better judgment that whispered restraint.  She wanted desperately to hurt him, as he had hurt her, even though she had to behave badly to do it.

“Will you tell me what else there was to do?  Where could I have taken her at that time of night?  Are reputable hotels open at midnight to lone women, wet and ragged, who come without baggage either alone or escorted by a man?”

“I’m not telling you what you ought to have done, Mr. Lindsay,” she answered with a touch of hauteur.  “But since you ask me—­why couldn’t you have given her money and let her find a place for herself?”

“Because that wouldn’t have saved her.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it?” she retorted dryly.

He walked over to the fireplace and put an elbow on the corner of the mantel.  The blood leaped in the veins of the girl as she looked at him, a man strong as tested steel, quiet and forceful, carrying his splendid body with the sinuous grace that comes only from perfectly synchronized muscles.  At that moment she hated him because she could not put him in the wrong.

“Lemme tell you a story, Miss Beatrice,” he said presently.  “Mebbe it’ll show you what I mean.  I was runnin’ cattle in the Galiuros five years ago and I got caught in a storm ’way up in the hills.  When it rains in my part of Arizona, which ain’t often, it sure does come down in sheets.  The clay below the rubble on the slopes got slick as ice.  My hawss, a young one, slipped and fell on me, clawed back to its feet, and bolted.  Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from even a whistlin’ post in the desert, gettin’ wetter and colder every blessed minute.  Heaps of times in my life I’ve felt more comfortable than I did right then.  I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my broken ankle, as you might say.  And the weather and my game laig and things generally kept gettin’ no better right along hour after hour.