the hills, and round up the whole fourteen here for you. Then
school can keep right here in the house. How about that? Ain't that a
good notion, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"

She could stand his ironic mockery no longer. She faced him, fearless as
a tiger: "You villain!"

With that, turning on her heel, she passed swiftly into her little
bedroom, and slammed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.

"She's sure got some devil in her," he laughed appreciatively, and he
cracked another walnut.

Already he had struck the steel of her quality. She would be his
prisoner because she must, but the "no compromise" flag was nailed to
her masthead.

"I wonder why you are so fond of me?" he mused aloud next day when he
found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.

He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full
length at supple ease. Leaning on an elbow, he had been watching her for
some time.

Her gaze was on the distant line of hills; on her face that far-away
expression which told him that he was not on the map for her. Used as he
was to impressing himself upon the imagination of women, this stung his
vanity sharply. He liked better the times when her passion flamed out at
him.

Now he lost his sardonic mockery in a flash of anger.

"Do you hear me? I asked you a question."

She brought her head round until her eyes rested upon him.

"Will you ask it again, please? I wasn't listening."

"I want to know what makes you hate me so," he demanded roughly.

"Do I hate you?"

He laughed irritably. "What else do you call it? You won't hardly eat at
the same table with me. Last night you wouldn't come down to supper.
Same way this morning. If I sit down near you, soon you find an excuse
to leave. When I speak, you don't answer."

"You are my jailer, not my friend."

"I might be both."

"No, thank you!"

She said it with such quick, instinctive certainty that he ground his
teeth in resentment. He was the kind of man that always wanted what he
could not get. He began to covet this girl mightily, even while he told
himself that he was a fool for his pains. What was she but an untaught,
country schoolgirl? It would be a strange irony of fate if Buck Weaver
should fall in love with a sheepman's daughter.

"Many people would go far to get my friendship," he told her.

Quietly she looked at him. "The friends of my people are my friends.
Their enemies are mine."

"Yet you said y