“I’ll report it when you give me permission.”

“I—?  What—?” She wheeled to face him.

“Think a moment.  I can’t tell half the truth.  And if I tell everything it will lead to—­gossip.”

“Ah!  I think I understand.  Mr. Law, you can be insulting—­”

For the first time the man lost muscular control of his features; they twitched, and under their tan his cheeks became a sickly yellow.

“You’ve no right to say that,” he told her, harshly.  “You’ve plumb overstepped yourself, ma’am, and—­I reckon you’ve formed quite a wrong opinion of me and of the facts.  Let me tell you something about that killing and about myself, so you’ll have it all straight before you bring in your verdict.  You say Panfilo was unarmed, and you call it—­murder.  He had his six-shooter and he used it; he had the darkness and the swiftest horse, too.  He intended to ambush me and release his companion, but I forced his hand; so it ain’t what I’d call murder.  Now about myself:  Panfilo isn’t the first man I’ve killed, and he may not be the last, but I haven’t lost any sleep over it, and I’d have killed him just as quick if I hadn’t been an officer.  That’s the kind of man I am, and you may as well know it.  I—­”

“You are utterly ruthless.”

“Yes’m!”

“You left him there without burial.”

Law shrugged impatiently.  “What’s the difference?  He’s there to stay; and he’s just as dead under the stars as he’d be under the sand.  I’d rather lie facing the sky than the grass roots.”

“But—­you must have known it would get out, sometime.  This puts both of us in a very bad light.”

“I know.  But I stood on my cards.  I’d have preferred to report it, but—­I’d keep still again, under the same circumstances.  You seem to consider that an insult.  If it is, I don’t know how to compliment you, ma’am.”

Alaire pondered this statement briefly before saying, “You have a strange way of looking at the affair—­a strange, careless, unnatural way, it seems to me.”

“Perhaps that’s the fault of my training.  I’m not what you would consider a nice person; the death of Panfilo Sanchez means nothing whatever to me.  If you can grasp that fact, you’ll see that your own reputation weighed heavier in my mind than the lives of a dozen Mexicans—­or whites, for that matter.  People know me for what I am, and—­that may have had something to do with my decision.”

“I go anywhere, everywhere.  No one has ever had the effrontery to question my actions,” Alaire told him, stiffly.

“And I don’t aim to give ’em a chance.”  Dave was stubborn.

There was another interval of silence.

“You heard what Jose said.  What are you going to do?”

Dave made a gesture of indifference.  “It doesn’t greatly matter.  I’ll tell him the truth, perhaps.”

Such an attitude was incomprehensible to Alaire and brought an impatient frown to her brow.  “You don’t seem to realize that he will try to revenge himself.”