school-mistress:

"Do you know how to shoot?"

He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making
sport of him.

"Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked.

This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy
costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of
the Bad Lands was _opera bouffe_.

"Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted.

"I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there
might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second
object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a
wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it
an even hundred and then retire?"

"I don't know!" she gasped.

"I must ask," he added, thoughtfully.

Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray
was twinkling enjoyably into hers.

"You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his
desperado pride. You are marked--don't you see, marked?" she persisted.
"And I brought it on! I am responsible!"

He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure
he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy.

"Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it
was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check
Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle
gets it all, just as you said."

This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his
own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her
temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her
next remark.

"I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!"
she stormed.

"That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a
dry climate."

She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a
second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead.

"Please--please promise me that you will not go to Little Rivers
to-night. Promise that you will turn back over the pass!"

"You put me between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible.
I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the
land of fossil dinosaurs."

"I had a brute on my hands," she thought; "now I have the Mad Hatter and
the March Hare in collaboration!"

"There is a big dinosaur co