Imperceptibly, almost, her whole body stiffened.  Her soft, relaxed, yielding attitude was gone.  But she remained silent, the same ominous, brooding silence that the desert had held before the storm, had Hanson but noticed.  He did not.  He was still pleading:  “Why all the time you been keeping me on the anxious seat, I been telling myself that the Black Pearl—­”

“Yes, the Black Pearl,” she interrupted him with her low, unpleasant laugh.  “Don’t you care a little that I got that name, Rudolf?”

“Care!” He wound his arms about her now and buried his face in the great waves of her inky, shining hair, wildly kissing the nape of her neck; but with a deft twist of her lithe body she slipped almost away from him, although his arms still held her.  “Care?  Of course I care.  But what’s that got to do with it when I love you like I do?  Pearl, if you were a good deal blacker than you’re painted it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”

He strove to draw her nearer to him, but again she slipped away, this time escaping the circle of his eager arms.  For the first time her face was turned toward him, but her eyes were cast down, her long lashes sweeping her cheeks.  “But I must be pretty bad to get called the Black Pearl,” she said in that same low voice; all of its sliding, drawling inflections were gone; it was strangely tense.

“I guess so, damn it!” he cried; “but I’m past caring, Pearl.  I got a hunger and thirst for you, honey, such as men die of out there in the desert.  Before God, I don’t care anything about your past or your present, if you’ll only love me for a while.”

With that low, harsh laugh of hers that sounded in his ears afterward like the first muttering menace of the sand wind over the desert, the storm broke.  Her eyes had an odd green glitter, her face was white, a dusky white, and her upper lip was drawn back from her teeth at each corner of the mouth.

“You fool!” Her voice was a muffled scream.  “Oh, you fool!  Sweeney could have told you better, any man on the desert could have told you better.  The Black Pearl!  Why, I’ve been called the Black Pearl since I was a baby, almost.  It’s my hair and my skin and my eyes.”

[Illustration:  “‘I’ll show you what I’ll do.’”]

He didn’t believe her, but he saw his blunder at once; cursed himself for it, and, mad to retrieve himself, began incoherent explanations and excuses.  “Of course,” he stammered, “of course, I—­I—­was just fooling, you know.  But, well, what does it matter, anyway?  Oh, Pearl, girl!  Don’t look at me like that.  Don’t!”

“I’ll do worse than look at you, if you come any nearer me,” she threatened.  “Do you think I ride all over the desert where I’ve a mind to without protection?  I guess not.”  She lifted her skirt with a quick movement and drew a long knife, keen as a stiletto, from her boot.

Hanson went a little whiter, but he was no coward.  “Come on then, finish it for me,” he said.  “Your eyes are doing it anyway.  Oh, Pearl!” he fell again to desperate pleading, “you won’t turn me down just for a mistake?”