Over the Pass | Page 4

five or six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump of their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck her with sudden alarm.
"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."
"I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of the specimen.

II
DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice.
What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself. Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to be formal.
"Now, Mister--" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her ears in relation to him.
"Jack is my name," he said simply.
"Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this is serious."
"It _was_," he answered. "At least, unpleasant."
"It is, now. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he would draw."
"He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable affirmation.
"He has six notches on his gun-handle--six men that he has killed!" Mary went on.
"Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker who keeps right on the job."
She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked categorically, with the precision of a 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 _opéra 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 come to life on the other side," he proceeded. "I just got through the pass in time. I could feel