TATION GIVEN AND ACCEPTED

And already she had met him. Not only met him, but saved him from the
just vengeance about to fall upon him. She had not yet seen her own
ranch, had not spoken to a single one of her employees, for it had
been a part of her plan to drop in unexpected and examine the situation
before her foreman had a chance to put his best foot forward. So she
had started alone from Gimlet Butte that morning in her machine, and had
come almost in sight of the Lazy D ranch houses when the battle in the
coulee invited her to take a hand.

She had acted on generous impulse, and the unforeseen result had been to
save this desperado from justice. But the worst of it was that she could
not find it in her heart to regret it. Granted that he was a villain,
double-dyed and beyond hope, yet he was the home of such courage, such
virility, that her unconsenting admiration went out in spite of herself.
He was, at any rate, a MAN, square-jawed, resolute, implacable. In the
sinuous trail of his life might lie arson, robbery, murder, but he still
held to that dynamic spark of self-respect that is akin to the divine.
Nor was it possible to believe that those unblinking gray eyes, with
the capability of a latent sadness of despair in them, expressed a soul
entirely without nobility. He had a certain gallant ease, a certain
attractive candor, that did not consist with villainy unadulterated.

It was characteristic even of her impulsiveness that Helen Messiter
curbed the swift condemnation that leaped to her lips when she knew
that the man sitting beside her was the notorious bandit of the Shoshone
fastnesses. She was not in the least afraid. A sure instinct told her he
was not the kind of a man of whom a woman need have fear so long as
her own anchor held fast. In good time she meant to let him have
her unvarnished opinion of him, but she did not mean it to be an
unconsidered one. Wherefore she drove the machine forward toward the
camelbacked peak he had indicated, her eyes straight before her, a frown
corrugating her forehead.

For him, having made his dramatic announcement, he seemed content for
the present with silence. He leaned back in the car and appreciated her
with a coolness that just missed impudence. Certainly her appearance
proclaimed her very much worth while. To dwell on the long lines of her
supple young body, the exquisite throat and chin curve, was a pleasure
with a thrill to it. As a physical creation, a mer