“Don’t you worry, kid.  It’s all right.  You didn’t mean—­”

He broke off in swift, unspeakable amazement.  His eye traveled up the slender figure from the telltale skirt.  This was no boy at all, but a girl.  As he took in the mass of blue-black hair and the soft but clean-cut modeling from ear to chin, his hand fell from her shoulder.  What an idiot he had been not to know from the first that such a voice could have come only from a woman!  He had been deceived by the darkness and by the slouch hat she wore.  He wanted to laugh in sardonic scorn of his perception.

But on the heel of that came a realization of her danger.  He must get her out of there at once, for he knew that the enemy must be circling round, to take them on the flank too.  It was not a question of whether they could hold off the attackers.  They might do that, and yet she might be killed while they were doing it.  A man used to coping with emergencies, his brain now swiftly worked out a way of escape.

“Yore father and I will take care of these coyotes.  You slip along those shadows up the hill to where my Teddy hawss is, and burn the wind out of here,” he told her.

“I’ll not leave dad,” she said quickly.

The old mountaineer behind the horse laughed apologetically.  “I been trying to git her to go, but she won’t stir.  With the pinto daid, o’ course we couldn’t both make it.”

“That’s plumb foolishness,” the Texan commented irritably.

“Mebbe,” admitted the girl; “but I reckon I’ll stay long as dad does.”

“No use being pigheaded about it.”

Her dark eyes flashed.  “Is this your say-so, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is?” she asked sharply, less because she resented what he said than because she was strung to a wire edge.

His troubled gaze took in again her slim girlishness.  The frequency of danger had made him proof against fear for himself, but just now he was very much afraid for her.  Hard man as he was, he had the Southerner’s instinctive chivalry toward woman.

“You better go, Arlie,” her father counseled weakly.

“Well, I won’t,” she retorted emphatically.

The old man looked whimsically at the Texan.  “Yo’ see yo’self how it is, stranger.”

Fraser saw, and the girl’s stanchness stirred his admiration even while it irritated him.  He made his decision immediately.

“All right.  Both of you go.”

“But we have only one horse,” the girl objected.  “They would catch us.”

“Take my Teddy.”

“And leave you here?” The dark eyes were full on him again, this time in a wide-open surprise.

“Oh, I’ll get out once you’re gone.  No trouble about that.”

“How?”

“We couldn’t light out, and leave yo’ here,” the father interrupted.

“Of course we couldn’t,” the girl added quickly.  “It isn’t your quarrel, anyhow.”

“What good can you do staying here?” argued Fraser.  “They want you, not me.  With you gone, I’ll slip away or come to terms with them.  They haven’t a thing against me.”