Even to his somewhat prejudiced eyes she was not an attractive creature, for she possessed no clear conception of how to render apparent those few feminine charms she possessed.  Negligence and total unconsciousness of self, coupled with lack of womanly companionship and guidance, had left her altogether in the rough.  He marked now the coarse ragged shoes, the cheap patched skirt, the tousled auburn hair, the sunburnt cheeks with a suggestion of freckles plainly visible beneath the eyes, and some of the fastidiousness of earlier days caused him to shrug his shoulders.  Yet underneath the tan there was the glow of perfect young health; the eyes were frank, brave, unflinching; while the rounded chin held a world of character in its firm contour.  Somehow the sight of this brought back to him that abiding faith in her “dead gameness” which had first awakened his admiration.  “She’s got it in her,” he thought, silently, “and, by thunder!  I ’m here to help her get it out.”

“Kid,” he ventured at last, turning over a broken fragment of rock between his restless fingers, but without lifting his eyes, “you were talking while we came up the trail about how we ’d do this and that after a while.  You don’t suppose I ’m going to have any useless girl like you hanging around on to me, do you?”

She glanced quickly about at him, as though such unexpected expressions startled her from a pleasant reverie.  “Why, I—­I thought that was the way you planned it yesterday,” she exclaimed, doubtfully.

“Oh, yesterday!  Well, you see, yesterday I was sort of dreaming; to-day I am wide awake, and I ’ve about decided, Kid, that for your own good, and my comfort, I ’ve got to shake you.”

A sudden gleam of fierce resentment leaped into the dark eyes, the unrestrained glow of a passion which had never known control.  “Oh, you have, have you, Mister Bob Hampton?  You have about decided!  Well, why don’t you altogether decide?  I don’t think I’m down on my knees begging you for mercy.  Good Lord!  I reckon I can get along all right without you—­I did before.  Just what happened to give you such a change of heart?”

“I made the sudden discovery,” he said, affecting a laziness he was very far from feeling, “that you were too near being a young woman to go traipsing around the country with me, living at shacks, and having no company but gambling sharks, and that class of cattle.”

“Oh, did you?  What else?”

“Only that our tempers don’t exactly seem to jibe, and the two of us can’t be bosses in the same ranch.”

She looked at him contemptuously, swinging her body farther around on the rock, and sitting stiffly, the color on her cheeks deepening through the sunburn.  “Now see here, Mister Bob Hampton, you’re a fraud, and you know it!  Did n’t I understand exactly who you was, and what was your business?  Did n’t I know you was a gambler, and a ’bad man’?  Didn’t I tell you plain enough