ssed into a straight line
and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a
public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized
that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of
expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident.

"It's wonderful--wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative
awe.

"What is?" she asked.

"Why, how fast you sew!"

"Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite
all right? No danger of infection?"

"I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent.

She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought
her out of her pose and she became vivid and real.

"Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms.

But she met a new phase--neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying
coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she
be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility?

"I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said.

"How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into
her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points.

"I don't. I only know how I think you feel--how you might well feel," he
answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should
not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law
for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town."

"But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed.

"Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was
bravado, with no thought of your position."

"It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want
anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you
should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all
bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards."

"And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into
danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a
barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if
I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would
do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!"

"There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To
how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels
had he known in his wanderings from