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“‘What is one to call you?’ I asked him.

“He hesitated an instant. ‘Jim is what I answer to around here,’ said he.

“‘What is your name ?’ I repeated.

“‘The lady can call me anything she likes,’–he spoke in a low, lazy voice,–‘but Dick Malaby is my name.’

“We have better heroes now than the Cheyenne cowboys, but I felt as a girl to-day would feel if she discovered she had been telling one of the men of the Merrimac to ride behind!”

“They would not need to be told,” Mrs. Thorne interjected.

“No, that is the difference; but discipline did not appeal to me then; recklessness did. Every man on the place had taken sides on the Wyoming question; feeling ran high. Some of them had friends and relatives among the victims. Yet this man in hiding had tossed me his name to play with, not even asking for my silence, though it was the price of his life, and all in a light-hearted contempt for the curious ways of the ‘tony set,’ as he would have called us.

“I signed to him one evening to ride up. ‘I want you to talk to me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the cattle war.’

“‘Miss Benedet forgets–my place is behind.’ He touched his hat and fell back again. Lesson for lesson–we were quits. I made no further attempt to corrupt my own pupil.

“We rode in silence after that, but I was never without the sense of his ironical presence. I was conscious of showing off before him. I wished him to see that I could ride. Fences and ditches, rough or smooth, he never interfered with my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl’s riding to him? He knew a pace–all the paces–that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and how it must strike him.

“In the absence of words between us, externals spoke with greater force. He had the Greek line of head and throat, and he sat his horse with a dare-devil repose. The eloquence of his mute attitudes, his physical mastery of the conditions, his strength repressed, tied to my silly freaks and subject to my commands, while his thoughts roamed free! That was the beginning. It lasted through a week of starlight and a week of moonlight–lyric nights with the hot, close days between; and each night an increasing interest attached to the moment when he was to put me on my horse. I make no apology for myself after that.

“One evening we approached a gate at the farther end of our longest course, and the gate stood open. He rode on to close it. I stopped him. ‘I am going out,’ I said. It was a resolution taken that moment. He held up his watch to the light, which made me angry.

“‘Go back to the stables,’ I said, ‘if you are due there. I don’t want to know the time.’

“He brought his horse alongside. ‘Where is Miss Benedet going, please?’

“‘Anywhere,’ I said, ‘where it will be cool in the morning.’

“‘Miss Benedet will have a long ride. Does she wish for company?’

“I did not answer. Something drove me forward, though I was afraid.

“‘Outside that gate,’ he went on quietly, ‘ I shall set the pace, and I do not ride behind.’ Still I did not answer. ‘Is that the understanding?’

“‘Ride where you please,’ I said.

“After that he took command, not roughly or familiarly, but he no longer used the third person, as I had instructed him, in speaking to me. The first time he said ‘you’ it sent the blood to my face. We were far up the mountain then, and morning was upon us.

“I wish to be definite here. From the moment I saw him plainly face to face the illusion was gone. Before, I had seen him by every light but daylight, and generally in profile. The profile is not the man. It is the plan in outline, but the eyes, the mouth, tell what he has made of himself. So attitude is not speech. As a shape in the moonlight he had been eloquent, but once at my side, talking with me naturally–I need not go on! From that moment our journey was to me a dream of horror, a series of frantic plans for escape.