me, insist that there was always a flaw in the
character of a person with large, soft brown eyes."

"Isn't there a flaw in every character?"

"Human nature being imperfect, there must be. What is yours; suppressed
murderousness?"

"Not at all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I
came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around
Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote
some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When the
smoke cleared away, there was one dead and six others shot up, and
Little Brownie was out on the desert, riding for the next place, awfully
sore over a hole in his new sombrero. He was a two-gun man from down
near the border. Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn't understand why
every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver,
told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy's. Cheap and easy
way to get a reputation, isn't it?"

"But you must have something back of it," insisted the girl. "Are you a
good shot?"

"Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town."

"Yet you pin some faith to your 'gun,'" she pointed out.

He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Io jumped forward with a
startled cry. So swift and secret had been his motion that she hardly
saw the weapon before--PLACK--PLACK--PLACK--the three shots had sounded.
The smoke drifted around him in a little circle, for the first two shots
had been over his shoulder and the third as he whirled. Walking back, he
carefully examined the trunks of three trees.

"I'd have only barked that fellow, if he'd been a man," he observed,
shaking his head at the second mark.

"You frightened me," complained Io.

"I'm sorry. I thought you wanted to see a little gun-play. Out here it
isn't how straight you can shoot at a bull's-eye, but how quick you can
plant your bullets, and usually in a mark that isn't obliging enough to
be dead in line. So I practice occasionally, just in case."

"Very interesting. But I've got luncheon to cook," said Io.

They returned through the desert. As he opened the door of the shack for
her, Banneker, reverting to her autobiographical sketch, remarked
thoughtfully and without preliminary:

"I might have known there couldn't be any one else like you."

CHAPTER XI

Although the vehicle of his professional activities had for some years
been a small and stertorous automobile locally known as "Puffy