"It is!" she said decisively.
"I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal.
"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements."
His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist appear a negligible quantity.
"There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him. He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot.
"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.
"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.
"We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.
"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small."
Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination.
"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.
There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.
"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.
"Whistle—whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw, you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good—I'll get you!"
With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way.
"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.
From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless.
"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!"
His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete.
"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.
"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to fall in with his cue.
"The swooning age outlasted him—lasted, indeed, into the era of hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."
"They do give medals," she added.
"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"
Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five or six miles from a settlement—well, it was a fact. Over the bump of their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck her with sudden alarm.
"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."
"I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of the specimen.
II
DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice.
What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself. Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to be formal.
"Now, Mister—" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her ears in relation to him.
"Jack is my name," he said simply.
"Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this is serious."
"It was," he answered. "At least, unpleasant."
"It is, now. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he would draw."
"He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable affirmation.
"He has six notches on his gun-handle—six men that he has killed!"
Mary went on.
"Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker who keeps right on the job."
She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked categorically, with the precision of a school-mistress:
"Do you know how to shoot?"
He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making sport of him.
"Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked.
This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of the Bad Lands was opéra bouffe.
"Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted.
"I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it an even hundred and then retire?"
"I