"Afraid I can't enthuse with you on that subject for a day or two yet," he answered with a laugh. "Truth is I found their childlike impulses both painful and annoying. Next time you see them you might mention that I'm liable to have an impulse of my own they won't enjoy."
"That's one of the things I want to talk with you about. Manuel says you mean to prosecute. I hope you won't. They're friends of mine. They thought they were helping me. Of course I have no claim on you, but----"
"You have a claim, Miss Valdés. We'll take that up presently. Just now we're talking about a couple of criminals due for a term in the penitentiary. I offered them terms. They wouldn't accept. Good enough. They'll have to stand the gaff, I reckon."
She realized at once there was no use arguing with him. The steel in his eyes told her he had made up his mind and was not to be moved. But she could not desert her foolish dependents.
"I know. What you say is quite true, but--I'll have to come to some agreement with you. I can't let them be punished for their loyalty to me."
Her direct, unflinching look, its fearlessness, won his admiration. In her slim suppleness, vibrant, feminine to the finger tips, alluring with the unconscious appeal of sex, there was a fine courage to face frankly essential facts. But he was a hard man to move once he had made up his mind. For all his frivolous impudence and his boyish good nature, he knew his own mind, and held to it with the stiffness characteristic of outdoor Westerners.
"You're not in this, Miss Valdés. I'll settle my own accounts with your friends Sebastian and Pablo."
"But even for your own sake----" She stopped, intuitively aware that this was not the ground upon which to treat with him. He would never drop the charges against the Mexicans merely because there was danger in pressing them.
"I reckon I'll have to try to look out for myself. Maybe next time I won't be so easy a mark," he answered with an almost insolent laugh.
Valencia was a little puzzled. Things were not going right, and she did not quite know the reason. There was just a touch of bitterness in his voice, of aloofness in his manner. She did not know that the sight of the solitaire sparkling on her left hand stirred in him the impulse to hurt her, to refuse rather than concede her requests.
"You're not going to push the cases against Pablo and Sebastian and still try to live in the valley, are you?" she asked, beginning to feel a little irritation at him.