Over the Pass | Page 3

he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed so superficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly, yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.
"What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still rested on his holster.
"None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he asked her.
After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of appreciative and conventional gratitude.
"It is!" she said decisively.
"I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal.
"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements."
His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist appear a negligible quantity.
"There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him. He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot.
"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.
"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.
"We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.
"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small."
Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination.
"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.
There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.
"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.
"Whistle--whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw, you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good--I'll get you!"
With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way.
"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.
From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless.
"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!"
His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete.
"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.
"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to fall in with his cue.
"The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era of hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."
"They do give medals," she added.
"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"
Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world,