e up. He asked
for her uncle. Bonita told him Duke had gone to Calabasas. Gale
announced he was bound for Calabasas himself, and dismounted near Nan,
professedly to cinch his saddle. He fussed with the straps for a
minute, trying to engage Nan in the interval, without success, in
conversation. "Look here, Nan," he said at length, studiously amiable,
"don't you think you're pretty hard on me, lately?"

"No, I don't," she answered. "If Uncle Duke didn't make me, I'd never
look at you, or speak to you--or live in the same mountains with
you."

"I don't think when a fellow cares for you as much as I do, and gets
out of patience once in a while, just because he loves a girl the way
a red-blooded man can't help loving her, she ought to hold it against
him forever. Think she ought to, Nan?" he demanded after a pause. She
was sewing and had kept silence.

"I think," she responded, showing her aversion in every syllable,
"before a man begins to talk red-blood rot, he ought to find out
whether the girl cares for him, or just loathes the sight of him."

He regarded her fixedly. Paying no attention to him, but bending in
the sunshine over her sewing, her hand flying with the needle, her
masses of brown hair sweeping back around her pink ears and curling in
stray ringlets that the wind danced with while she worked, she
inflamed her brawny cousin's ardor afresh. "You used to care for me,
Nan. You can't deny that." Her silence was irritating. "Can you?" he
demanded. "Come, put up your work and talk it out. I didn't use to
have to coax you for a word and a smile. What's come over you?"

"Nothing has come over me, Gale. I did use to like you--when I first
came back from school. You seemed so big and fine then, and were so
nice to me. I did like you."

"Why didn't you keep on liking me?"

Nan made no answer. Her cousin persisted. "You used to talk about
thinking the world of me," she said at last; "then I saw you one
Frontier Day, riding around Sleepy Cat with a carriage full of
women."

Gale burst into a huge laugh. Nan's face flushed. She bent over her
work. "Oh, that's what's the matter with you, is it?" he demanded
jocularly. "You never mentioned _that_ before."

"That isn't the only thing," she continued after a pause.

"Why, that was just some Frontier Day fun, Nan. A man's got to be a
little bit of a sport once in a while, hasn't he?"

"Not if he likes me." She spoke with an ominous distinctness, but
under her breat