be seen now and then galloping
through the dust, so that their progress was marked always by a
smothering cloud of gray. Then she looked at Grant unexpectedly, met one
of his sharp glances, and flushed hotly again.

"How about this business of hating each other, and not speaking except
to please Aunt Phoebe?" he demanded, with a suddenness which startled
himself. He had been thinking it, but he hadn't intended to say it until
the words spoke themselves. "Are we supposed to keep on acting the fool
indefinitely?"

"I was not aware that I, at least, was acting the fool," she retorted,
with a washed-out primness.

"Oh, I can't fight the air, and I'm not going to try. What I've got
to say, I prefer to say straight from the shoulder. I'm sick of this
standing off and giving each other the bad eye over nothing. If we're
going to stay on the same ranch, we might as well be friends. What do
you say?"

For a time he thought she was not going to say anything. She was staring
at the dust-cloud ahead, and chewing absently at the corner of her under
lip, and she kept it up so long that Good Indian began to scowl and call
himself unseemly names for making any overture whatever. But, just as he
turned toward her with lips half opened for a bitter sentence, he saw a
dimple appear in the cheek next to him, and held back the words.

"You told me you didn't like me," she reminded, looking at him briefly,
and afterward fumbling her reins. "You can't expect a girl--"

"I suppose you don't remember coming up to me that first night, and
calling me names, and telling me how you hated me, and--and winding up
by pinching me?" he insinuated with hypocritical reproach, and felt of
his arm. "If you could see the mark--" he hinted shamelessly.

Evadna replied by pushing up her sleeve and displaying a scratch at
least an inch in length, and still roughened and red. "I suppose you
don't remember trying to MURDER me?" she inquired, sweetly triumphant.
"If you could shoot as well as Jack, I'd have been killed very likely.
And you'd be in jail this minute," she added, with virtuous solemnity.

"But you're not killed, and I'm not in jail."

"And I haven't told a living soul about it--not even Aunt Phoebe,"
Evadna remarked, still painfully virtuous. "If I had--"

"She'd have wondered, maybe, what you were doing away down there in
the middle of the night," Good Indian finished. "I didn't tell a soul,
either, for that matter."

They left the mea