Durand took the girl in to dinner with him and they sat not far from Lindsay.  Kitty was lost to any memory of those about her.  She was flirting joyously with a sense of newly awakened powers.  The man from Graham County, Arizona, felt uneasy in his mind.  The girl was flushed with fife.  In a way she was celebrating her escape from the narrow horizon in which she had lived.  It was in the horoscope of her temperament to run forward gayly to meet adventure, but when the man opposite her ordered wine and she sipped it reluctantly with a little grimace, the cowpuncher was of opinion that she was likely to get more of this adventure than was good for her.  In her unsophistication danger lay.  For she was plainly easily influenced, and in the beat of her healthy young blood probably there was latent passion.

They left the diner before Clay.  He passed them later in the vestibule of the sleeper.  They were looking out together on the moonlit plain through which the train was rushing.  The arm of the man was stretched behind her to the railing and with the motion of the car the girl swayed back slightly against him.

Again Clay sought the smoking compartment and was led into talk by the officer.  It was well past eleven when he rose, yawned, and announced, “I’m goin’ to hit the hay.”

Most of the berths were made up and it was with a little shock of surprise that his eyes fell on Kitty Mason and her new friend, the sleek black head of the man close to her fair curls, his steady eyes holding her like a charmed bird while his caressing voice wove the fairy tale of New York to which she yielded herself in strange delight.

“Don’t you-all want yo’ berth made up, lady?”

It was the impatient porter who interrupted them.  The girl sprang up tremulously to accept.

“Oh, please.  Is it late?” Her glance swept down the car and took in the fact that her section alone was not made up.  “I didn’t know—­why, what time is it?”

“Most twelve, ma’am,” replied the aggrieved porter severely.

She flashed a look of reproach at her companion and blushed again as she fled with her bag to the ladies’ dressing-room.  As for the man, Lindsay presently came on him in the smoking-room where he sat with an unlit cigar between his teeth and his feet on a chair.  Behind half-shuttered lids his opaque eyes glittered with excitement.  Clearly he was reviewing in his mind the progression of his triumph.  Clay restrained a good, healthy impulse to pick a row with him and go to the mat with the ex-prize-fighter.  But after all it was none of his business.

The train was rolling through the cornfields of the Middle West when the Arizonan awoke.  He was up early, but not long before Kitty Mason, who was joined at once by Durand.

“Shucks!  Nothin’ to it a-tall,” the range-rider assured himself.  “That li’l’ girl sure must have the number of this guy.  She’s flirtin’ with him to beat three of a kind, but I’ll bet a dogie she knows right where she’s at.”