n on her smooth, round arm.

"Do you understand?" he queried.

"Yes, why, yes," she answered, turning around. "It's very good of you to
want to be a friend of mine. I didn't think so, though, when you tried
to kiss me. But maybe it's all right since you've explained things. You
see I'm different from you. I like everybody to like me and I like to
like everybody. It makes one so much happier. You wouldn't believe it,
but you ought to try it, sir, just to see. It's so good to be good to
people and to have people good to you. And everybody has always been
so good to me. Mamma and papa, of course, and Billy, the stableman, and
Montalegre, the Portugee foreman, and the Chinese cook, even, and Mr.
Delaney--only he went away--and Mrs. Vacca and her little----"

"Delaney, hey?" demanded Annixter abruptly. "You and he were pretty good
friends, were you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered. "He was just as GOOD to me. Every day in the
summer time he used to ride over to the Seed ranch back of the Mission
and bring me a great armful of flowers, the prettiest things, and I used
to pretend to pay him for them with dollars made of cheese that I cut
out of the cheese with a biscuit cutter. It was such fun. We were the
best of friends."

"There's another lamp smoking," growled Annixter. "Turn it down, will
you?--and see that somebody sweeps this floor here. It's all littered up
with pine needles. I've got a lot to do. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, sir."

Annixter returned to the ranch house, his teeth clenched, enraged, his
face flushed.

"Ah," he muttered, "Delaney, hey? Throwing it up to me that I fired
him." His teeth gripped together more fiercely than ever. "The best
of friends, hey? By God, I'll have that girl yet. I'll show that
cow-puncher. Ain't I her employer, her boss? I'll show her--and Delaney,
too. It would be easy enough--and then Delaney can have her--if he wants
her--after me."

An evil light flashing from under his scowl, spread over his face. The
male instincts of possession, unreasoned, treacherous, oblique, came
twisting to the surface. All the lower nature of the man, ignorant of
women, racked at one and the same time with enmity and desire, roused
itself like a hideous and abominable beast. And at the same moment,
Hilma returned to her house, humming to herself as she walked, her white
dress glowing with a shimmer of faint saffron light in the last ray of
the after-glow.

A little after half-past seven, the first car