"I should. Very much. This merely shows you don't understand us at all, Mr. Gordon."
"I wish I had that box. It ce'tainly disarranges my plans to have it gone," he said irritably.
"I assure you I didn't take it."
"I don't lay it to you, though it would ce'tainly be to your advantage to take it," he laughed, already mollified.
"Will you please explain that?"
"All my claims of title to this land grant are in that box, Miss Valdés," he remarked placidly, as if it were a matter of no consequence.
She went white at his words.
"And it is lost--probably in the hands of my people. We must get it back."
"But you're on the other side of the fence," he reminded her gaily.
With dignity she turned on him.
"Do you think I want to beat you that way? Do you think I am a highwayman, or that I shall let my people be?"
"You make them draw the line between murder and robbery," he suggested pleasantly.
"I couldn't stop them from attacking you, but I can see they don't keep your papers--all the more, that it is to their interest and mine to keep them."
She said it with such fine girlish pride, her head thrown a little back, her eyes gleaming, scorn of his implied distrust in her very carriage. For long he joyfully carried the memory of it.
Surely, she was the rarest creature it had ever been his fortune to meet. Small wonder the gallant Spaniard Don Manuel loved her. Small wonder her people fed on her laughter, and were despondent at her frowns.
Dick Gordon was awake a good deal that night, for the pain and the fever were still with him; but the hours were short to him, full of joy and also of gloom. Shifting pictures of her filled the darkness. His imagination saw her in many moods, in many manners. And when from time to time he dropped into light sleep, it was to carry her into his dreams.