Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden more recklessly.

Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the caÑon and out upon the plain.

Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon’s, to catch up.

Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. “Little Wicked One!” he called, coming up. “Have a care for my happiness if not for your neck!” But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded from his own. “Why, queridita? What—”

“I want you to leave me now.” She cut him abruptly off.

His big eyes widened. “After raising me to heaven would you plunge me in—”

“Ah no, no!” She impulsively thrust out her hand. “You have earned far more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But—”

“Si? But—”

She gave him a little wan smile. “When you come to understand girls better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the cause.”

“But—”

“Ramon,” she looked at him with sweet severity, “if I had told you on top of the mountain what I said back there—wouldn’t you have been content?”

“Assuredly! It was only—”

“Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now—and stay till I either send or come. It won’t be long—I promise.”

“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!”

Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off to the north.

His departure left her free to review the situation—with little satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out—in a moment of pique she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.

“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal; accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable thing, and now you’ll go through with it.”

It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal—the chief, if unconscious, cause of it all—was getting along; and though he was too far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting dejection.

As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as—as she could have wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.

“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but—no greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.”

For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a vagrant inclination—even if the latter were based on a sense of injury—might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance. Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed their hopelessness.

“Poor girl!” he pitied her.

“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.

Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her heroic mood. “Our friends”—she nodded toward the distant buildings—“are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to yourself.”

He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.

At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the patio gate, Lee did cheer up a little—partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom.

He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.”

He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow’s recipe for “liniment,” after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the stable. It ran:

“Dear Friend,—Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the fonda the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon.” In her ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: “But there is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the fonda, I am sure things will turn out all right.”

Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the signature “Your friend, Mary Mills.” Gordon had almost finished caring for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, he fished for further information.

“Any one else there?” he inquired, nonchalantly.

“Young Mexican,” Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive curtness.

“Ramon Icarza, I reckon.” Bull went innocently on: “He an’ Miss Lee were almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of him—”

“No reason why she shouldn’t.”

Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee’s horse to hide a chuckle. “Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary—” he paused, reddening, for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated it with lingering delight. “Mary—was right. We’ve sure stirred ’em up. On’y we’ll have to ’tend to Felicia at once.”

His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia’s solution with the characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light.

“You-all never orter ha’ taken him there,” he charged Sliver. “Here we go an’ import this young fellow at no end of trouble an’ expense, then you herd him right into the arms of another girl.”

“Aw! she don’t count.” Sliver excused himself. “She’s Mex an’ wild girl.” He sagely added: “You see, I was that anxious to make sure he didn’t drink. We kain’t have no young soaks ’round Lady-girl.”

His solicitude drew Jake’s satirical grin. “You wasn’t looking for a drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an’ wild—you damn fool, don’t you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He’s be’n there once an’ he’ll go again.”

“If he ain’t stopped,” Bull qualified.

“If he ain’t stopped,” Jake nodded. “An’ it’s up to you to do it.”

“But how?” Sliver’s broad, round face struggled like a full moon in clouds of helplessness. “How in the ’tarnal kin I stop him?”

“By ’quiring vested rights in the premises,” Jake nodded sagely. “If you marry her he kain’t come ’round.”

“Marry her? Me? Marry a Mex?” Sliver almost yelled it.

“That’s what.” While his thin lips parted in his characteristic wolf grin, Jake went on: “Anyhow, what’s your idee in shying an’ rearing this-a-way at domestic happiness wuss ’n a colt at flying paper? Why, other men rush for it like ’twas—”

“Sticky fly-paper,” Sliver ungallantly supplied. “An’ once they’re in—good night!”

But Jake ignored the interruption. “You-all orter take shame to yourself. Marriage is nature’s most holy an’ necessary ordinance. Don’t all the preachers tell it? An’ what would become of the census without it? But here, instead of accepting your lot with thankfulness an’ thanking your stars that a girl can be found that’s damn fool enough to take you, you-all go a-holding up your head an’ howling like a hungry coyote.”

While Jake thus orated, Sliver’s expression of obstinacy was leavened by fleeting hope. “If you b’lieve all that—what’s the matter with you marrying her yourself?”

Jake’s thin lips parted again in his sarcastic grin. “I’ve no calling for it. You see I’m that soft by nat’er any woman could crush my tender feelings. But one glance at your brutal count’nance would tell even a blind man that your wife would be kep’ in her place. Besides—was it me that took Gordon up there?”

“Quit your fooling,” Bull interposed. Then, unconscious of the humor of the situation, aware in his simplicity only of the danger to his cherished plan, he faced Sliver. “Yes or no—will you do it?”

“No, I’m da—”

“You won’t?” Bleak eyes pin-points of steel, teeth bared in a snarl, knife flashing blue in the lantern-light, Jake sprang from the pile of corn fodder on which he was sitting. “You upset the beans we put to b’ile an’ refuse to pick ’em up?”

Almost as quickly Sliver’s knife took the lantern gleam, and as they circled, looking for an opening, the friendly habit of the last months dropped away. They were again the rustlers, wild, fierce, united against man and his law, but equally ready to fight among themselves. But before they could close, Bull’s bulk pushed in between. One shove of his great hands sent them staggering back.

“Cut it out! We can’t stand for no blood-letting around Miss Lee.” Towering in the lantern-light, he turned to Sliver and laid down the law. “You an’ us have ridden an’ fit together for many a year. So far you’ve never failed us an’ I don’t believe you will. We brought this young fellow in, as you know, to cut that damn Mexican out, an’ you’ve sp’iled our game by throwing him in Felicia’s way. Now it’s up to you. If you make good—we go on. If you don’t—there’s the trail.”

He could not have taken better ground. Where threats would have provoked only further obstinacy, the appeal won. While putting up his knife, though, Sliver glared at Jake.

“I’ll knock your block off the first time I catch you alone on the range.” Addressing Bull, he went on: “Of course if it’s to help Lady-girl, you bet I’ll go the limit. But what d’you-all expect? That I’m a-going to cinch her with a priest an’ license?”

“That’d be more loving-like; she’d appreciate it, too.”

“Shut up, Jake! We don’t care so long as you acquire enough title to shoo Gordon off. Here’s fifty pesos. For half that, old Antonio ’u’d sell her along with his soul. You kin settle the details with him. Of course you’ll have to live out there for a whiles—mebbe till this Ramon business is knocked out of Miss Lee’s head.”

“What! An’ cut out the range?” Sliver exclaimed in horror. “Me hang around there a-selling aguardiente to peones?”

“What’s left after you get through,” Jake began, but was cut off again.

“No, we can arrange the work so there’ll be plenty for you within easy riding.”

“So’s you won’t be drug too far away during the honeymoon. She wouldn’t stan’ for that.”

Though a model in force and brevity, Sliver’s answer transcends print. He wound up with the complaint: “All right, I’ll go, but I see my finish. I’ll die on Felicia’s grub.”

“Couldn’t be any worse than Rosa’s,” Jake comforted. “You managed to live on that.”

With a certain resignation, but still grumbling, Sliver set out next morning. To make sure that he followed program, Jake and Bull packed his kit and even escorted him a mile or two on his way. Throughout all these preliminaries, Sliver’s mien was rather that of chief mourner at a funeral than a groom on his way to his bride, and just before they left him he even advanced a belated plea.

“Don’t you allow we ked get some one else?”

“With all the men in the country off at the wars?” Bull shook his head. “Besides, no peon could hold her down. She needs a strong hand.”

“It’s either you or Gordon,” Jake added. “You’ll have to sacrifice.”

Not until they turned homeward after his lone figure had faded behind the next rise did they consider how the affair was to be broken to Lee. “’Tain’t going to be so dreadful easy,” Bull frowned thoughtfully, “she being a girl and prejudiced. She’d hardly cotton to sech primitive nupt’als as Sliver is likely to consummate.”

“I she’d think not!” Jake looked his horror and scorn. “You’ll make a mess of it. Better leave it to me.”

Bull was quite willing, but though he had looked for some embroidery on the bare facts, the woof of romance Jake wove through the warp of fact at lunch that day made him choke on his food and gasp. A tale of secret love and stealthy visitations, a reluctant lady gradually won, ornamented with priests and licenses and other trimmings necessary for feminine approval, were woven into a consistent narrative that proved how much Bacchus gained and the Muses lost when Jake enlisted in the former’s service.

“No, Missy, you ain’t a-going to lose him,” Bull answered, on his part, Lee’s troubled question. “He’ll take care of things over that way.”

“Well—” Lee laughed, a little choked laugh, “I hope he’ll be—happy.” Then becoming conscious of Gordon’s gaze, she dropped her glance to her plate. But not before he had read its meaning.

“Why hadn’t this happened a week ago!”