“There wasn’t a chance in a million that anybody would hear, but I kept firin’ off my forty-five on the off hope.  And just before night a girl on a pinto came down the side of that uncurried hill round a bend and got me.  She took me to a cabin hidden in the bottom of a canon and looked after me four days.  Her father, a prospector, had gone into Tucson for supplies and we were alone there.  She fed me, nursed me, and waited on me.  We divided a one-room twelve-by-sixteen cabin.  Understand, we were four days alone together before her dad came back, and all the time the sky was lettin’ down a terrible lot of water.  When her father showed up he grinned and said, ’Lucky for you Myrtle heard that six-gun of yore’s pop!’ He never thought one evil thing about either of us.  He just accepted the situation as necessary.  Now the question is, what ought she to have done?  Left me to die on that hillside?”

“Of course not.  That’s different,” protested Beatrice indignantly.

“I don’t see it.  What she did was more embarrassing for her than what I did for Kitty.  At least it would have been mightily so if she hadn’t used her good hawss sense and forgot that she was a lone young female and I was a man.  That’s what I did the other night.  Just because there are seven or eight million human beings here the obligation to look out for Kitty was no less.”

“New York isn’t Arizona.”

“You bet it ain’t.  We don’t sit roostin’ on a fence when folks need our help out there.  We go to it.”

“You can’t do that sort of thing here.  People talk.”

“Sure, and hens cackle.  Let ’em!”

“There are some things men don’t understand,” she told him with an acid little smile of superiority.  “When a girl cries a little they think she’s heartbroken.  Very likely she’s laughing at them up her sleeve.  This girl’s making a fool of you, if you want the straight truth.”

“I don’t think so.”

His voice was so quietly confident it nettled her.

“I suppose, then, you think I’m ungenerous,” she charged.

The deep-set gray-blue eyes looked at her steadily.  There was a wise little smile in them.

“Is that what you think?” she charged.

“I think you’ll be sorry when you think it over.”

She was annoyed at her inability to shake him, at the steadfastness with which he held to his point of view.

“You’re trying to put me in the wrong,” she flamed.  “Well, I won’t have it.  That’s all.  You may take your choice, Mr. Lindsay.  Either send that girl away—­give her up—­have nothing to do with her, or—­”

“Or—?”

“Or please don’t come here to see me any more.”

He waited, his eyes steadily on her.  “Do you sure enough mean that, Miss Beatrice?”

Her heart sank.  She knew she had gone too far, but she was too imperious to draw back now.

“Yes, that’s just what I mean.”