He did not look away immediately, as he should have done, and Billy Louise felt a little heat-wave of embarrassment, emphasized by resentment.
"Are you going far?" he queried in the same tone he had employed before.
"Six miles," she answered shortly, though she tried to be decently civil.
"I've about eighteen," he said. "Looks like we'll both get caught out in a blizzard."
Certainly, he had a pleasant enough voice--and after all it was not his fault that he happened to be at the crossing when she rode out of the gorge. Billy Louise, in common justice, laid aside her resentment and looked at him with a hint of a smile at the corners of her lips.
"That's what we have to expect when we travel in this country in the winter," she replied. "Eighteen miles will take you long after dark."
"Well, I was sort of figuring on putting up at some ranch, if it got too bad. There's a ranch somewhere ahead, on the Wolverine, isn't there?"
"Yes." Billy Louise bit her lip; but hospitality is an unwritten law of the West--a law not to be lightly broken. "That's where I live. We'll be glad to have you stop there, of course."
The stranger must have felt and admired the unconscious dignity of her tone and words, for he thanked her simply and refrained from looking too intently at her face.
Fine siftings of snow, like meal flung down from a gigantic sieve, swept into their faces as they rode on. The man turned his face toward her after a long silence. She was riding with bowed head and face half turned from him and the wind alike.
"You'd better ride on ahead and get in out of this," he said curtly. "Your horse is fresh. It's going to be worse and more of it, before long; this cayuse of mine has had thirty miles or so of rough going."
"I think I'd better wait for you," she said primly. "There are bad places where the trail goes close to the bluff, and the lava rock will be slippery with this snow. And it's getting dark so fast that a stranger might go over."
"If that's the case, the sooner you are past the bad places the better. I'm all right. You drift along."
Billy Louise speculated briefly upon the note of calm authority in his voice. He did not know, evidently, that she was more accustomed to giving commands than to obeying them; her lips gave a little quirk of amusement at his mistake.