anxiously to see if Pollard were in the room. "You are going to give it
back to me?"

Her wonderment was hardly more than Thornton's. Why should she show this
eager excitement, because of a lost spur rowel?

"I rode over to give it to you," he answered, swinging her clear of an
eddy in the swirl of dancers and to the edge of the crowd. "First,
though, I want you to tell me something. A man came into the cabin about
three minutes before you came out to the barn, didn't he?"

She had lowered her eyes, aware that people were noticing them, her
looking up so earnestly, him looking down into her face so gravely. But
now, in spite of her, she looked up at him again.

"Why do you ask that?" she demanded with a flash of anger that he should
continue this useless pretence. "Do you think I am a fool?"

"No. I am asking because I want to know. It's a safe gamble that the man
you had a tussel with is the man who lamed my horse."

"Is it?" she asked with cool sarcasm. "And it's just as safe a gamble
that he is a coward and a ... brute!"

"I don't know about his being a coward, and I don't care about his being
a brute," he told her steadily. "But I do want to know what he looks
like."

Again she called herself a little fool and bit her lip in the surge of
her vexation. She had been glad and over eager just now to restore her
faith to this big brut of a man; at a mere word from him she had been
ready to condone a crime and forgive an insult.... She felt her face
grow hot; he had kissed her rudely and she had been willing to find
excuses, she had even felt as odd sort of thrill tingling through her.
And now this eternal play-acting of his, this insane pretence....

"Mr. Thornton, this is getting us nowhere," she reminded him coldly. "If
you care to be told I can assure you that I know perfectly well who the
man was who ... who came into the cabin that night. And I think that it
would be for the best if you returned ... my property!"

"I'm going to return it. Now, will you answer my question? Will you tell
me who that man was?"

"Why do you pretend in this stupid way?" she demanded hotly.

"Why don't you tell me who he was?" he returned, frowning a little.

For a moment she did not answer. Then, her voice very low, she said,
speaking slowly,

"I don't tell you, Mr. Thornton, because you know as well as I do!"

She saw nothing but blank amazement in his eyes.

"If I knew I wouldn't be asking you," he informed her.