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“Well, I’ll bet if you wanted what I want you’d be ‘most afraid to mention it,” he said, reaching down into the tall barley, and jerking up a handful of the bearded heads.

“Well, now, I bet I wouldn’t.”

“S’posin’ I wanted to get married?”

There was a silence so sudden that it had the effect of an explosion. Then Miss Starkweather giggled nervously.

“That’s just exactly what I do want,” persisted Parker desperately, turning his toe inward, and kicking the wagon-box.

There was another disheartening silence. Then the girl’s color flamed up under her rusty lace veil. She turned upon him witheringly.

“Well, what are ye goin’ to do about it? Set ’round and wait till some girl asks ye?”

Her voice had a fine sarcastic sting in it.

Parker whipped his brown overalls with a green barley-head.

“No; I ain’t such a bloomin’ idiot as I look.”

“I don’t know ’bout that,” answered the young woman coolly.

Parker faced about.

“Now, look here, Idy,” he said; “you’d ought to quit foolin’. You know what I mean well enough; you’re just purtendin’. You know I want to marry ye.”

“Me!” The girl lifted her brows until they disappeared under the edge of her much-becurled bang. “Want to marry me! Great Scott!”

“I don’t see why it’s great Scott or great anything else,” said Parker doggedly.

Idy held the reins in her left hand, and smoothed her alpaca lap with the whip handle, in maiden meditation.

“Well, I don’t know as ‘t is so very great after all,” she said, rubbing the folds of her dress, and glancing at him in giggling confusion.

Parker made an experimental motion with his right arm toward the back of the seat. The girl repelled him dexterously with her elbow.

“You drop that, Parker Lowe!” she said, with dignity. “I ain’t so far gone as all that. There’s that Gonsallies felluh lookin’ at us. You just straighten up, or I’ll hit ye a cut with this whip!”

Her lover gave a short, embarrassed laugh.

“Oh, come now, Idy; Ricardo don’t understand United States.”

“Well, I don’t care whether he understands United States or not. I guess idiots acts about the same in all languages. I’ll bet a dollar he understands what you’re up to, anyway; so there.”

She drove on, in rigid perpendicularity, past the adobe ranch-house of the Gonzales family, and around the curve of the lake-shore, into the sunshine of the wild mustard that fringed the road. Through it they could see the pale sheen of the ripening barley-fields, broken here and there by the darker green of alfalfa.

As the mustard grew taller and denser, Idy’s spine relaxed sufficiently to permit a covert, conciliatory glance toward her companion’s arm, which hung from the back of the seat in the disappointed attitude it had assumed at her repulse.

“I s’pose you think I’m awful touchy,” she broke out at last, “an’ mebbe I am; but before I promise to marry anybody, there’s two things he’s got to promise me –he’s got to sign the pledge, an’ he’s got to get even with that felluh Barden.”

Parker’s face, which had brightened perceptibly at the first requirement, clouded dismally at the second.

Idy dropped her chin on the silk handkerchief flaring softly at her throat, and looked at him deliciously sidewise from under her overshadowing frizz.

“I’ll promise any thing, Idy,” he protested, fervently abject.

Half an hour later they drove into Elsmore with the radiance of their betrothal still about them, and Idy drove the team up, with a skillful avoidance of the curb, before the “Live and Let Live Meat-Market.”

“I’m goin’ to get some round steak,” she said, giving the lines to Parker, who sprang to the sidewalk, “an’ then I’m goin’ over to Saunders’s to look at jerseys. You c’n go where you please, but if I see you loafin’ ’round a saloon there’ll be a picnic. If you tie the team, you want to put a halter on the pinto–he’s like me, he hates to be tied; he pulls back. If you hain’t got much to do, I think you’d better make a hitchin’-post of yerself, and not tie ‘im.”