The eyes of the older man gleamed wrathfully. "As for yo' six bits, if you
offer it to me I'll take it as an insult. At the Bar Double G we're not
doing friendly business with claim jumpers. Don't you evah set yo' legs
under my table again, seh."
Morse shrugged, turned away to the public desk, and addressed an envelope,
the while Lee glared at him from under his heavy beetling brows. Melissy
saw that her father was still of half a mind to throw out the intruder and
she called him to her.
"Dad, José wants you to look at the hoof of one of his wheelers. He asked
if you would come as soon as you could."
Beauchamp still frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand.
"Ce'tainly, honey. Glad to look at it."
"Dad! Please."
The ranchman went out, grumbling. Five minutes later Morse took his seat
on the stage beside the driver, having first left seventy-five cents on
the counter.
The stage had scarce gone when the girl looked up from her bookkeeping to
see the man with the Chihuahua hat.
"Buenos tardes, señorita," he gave her with a flash of white teeth.
"Buenos," she nodded coolly.
But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him.
They had rested upon men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood
so much.
He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot
kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every
motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the
man.
She supplied his wants while they chatted.
"Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven't you?" she suggested.
"Some. I'll take two bits' worth of that smokin', nina."
She shook her head. "I'm no little girl. Don't you know I'm now half past
eighteen?"
"My--my. That ad didn't do a mite of good, did it?"
"Not a bit."
"And you growing older every day."
"Does my age show?" she wanted to know anxiously.
The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her
dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the
laughter of his surface badinage.
"You're standing it well, honey."
The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress
in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland
flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy,
and, though the girl had never wakened to love, Nature was pushing her
relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but
scantily safeguarded her.