He stared at her. “The gambler? No wonder, then, your meeting is clandestine.”
She replied indignantly, her lips trembling. “He is not a gambler; he is a miner, over in the Black Range. He has not touched a card in two years.”
“Oh, reformed has he? And are you the instrument that has worked such a miracle?”
Her eyes fell. “I don’t know, but I hope so.” Then she glanced up again, wondering at his continued silence. “Don’t you understand yet?”
“Only that you are secretly meeting a man of the worst reputation, one known the length and breadth of this border as a gambler and fighter.”
“Yes; but—but don’t you know who I am?”
He smiled grimly, wondering what possible difference that could make. “Certainly; you are Miss Naida Herndon.”
“I? You have not known? Lieutenant Brant, I am Naida Gillis.”
He stopped still, again facing her. “Naida Gillis? Do you mean old Gillis’s girl? Is it possible you are the same we rescued on the prairie two years ago?”
She bowed her head. “Yes; do you understand now why I trust this Bob Hampton?”
“I perhaps might comprehend why you should feel grateful to him, but not why you should thus consent to meet with him clandestinely.”
He could not see the deep flush upon her cheeks, but he was not deaf to the pitiful falter in her voice.
“Because he has been good and true to me,” she explained, frankly, “better than anybody else in all the world. I don’t care what you say, you and those others who do not know him, but I believe in him; I think he is a man. They won’t let me see him, the Herndons, nor permit him to come to the house. He has not been in Glencaid for two years, until yesterday. The Indian rising has driven all the miners out from the Black Range, and he came down here for no other purpose than to get a glimpse of me, and learn how I was getting on. I—I saw him over at the hotel just for a moment—Mrs. Guffy handed me a note—and I—I had only just left him when I encountered you at the door. I wanted to see him again, to talk with him longer, but I couldn’t manage to get away from you, and I didn’t know what to do. There, I’ve told it all; do you really think I am so very bad, because—because I like Bob Hampton?”
He stood a moment completely nonplussed, yet compelled to answer.
“I certainly have no right to question your motives,” he said, at last, “and I believe your purposes to be above reproach. I wish I might give the same credit to this man Hampton. But, Miss Naida, the world does not often consent to judge us by our own estimation of right and wrong; it prefers to place its own interpretation on acts, and thus often condemns the innocent. Others might not see this as I do, nor have such unquestioning faith in you.”
“I know,” she admitted, stubbornly, “but I wanted to see him; I have been so lonely for him, and this was the only possible way.”