, even though she had to behave badly to do it.

"Will you tell me what else there was to do? Where could I have taken
her at that time of night? Are reputable hotels open at midnight to
lone women, wet and ragged, who come without baggage either alone or
escorted by a man?"

"I'm not telling you what you ought to have done, Mr. Lindsay," she
answered with a touch of hauteur. "But since you ask me--why couldn't
you have given her money and let her find a place for herself?"

"Because that wouldn't have saved her."

"Oh, wouldn't it?" she retorted dryly.

He walked over to the fireplace and put an elbow on the corner of the
mantel. The blood leaped in the veins of the girl as she looked at
him, a man strong as tested steel, quiet and forceful, carrying his
splendid body with the sinuous grace that comes only from perfectly
synchronized muscles. At that moment she hated him because she could
not put him in the wrong.

"Lemme tell you a story, Miss Beatrice," he said presently. "Mebbe
it'll show you what I mean. I was runnin' cattle in the Galiuros five
years ago and I got caught in a storm 'way up in the hills. When it
rains in my part of Arizona, which ain't often, it sure does come down
in sheets. The clay below the rubble on the slopes got slick as ice.
My hawss, a young one, slipped and fell on me, clawed back to its feet,
and bolted. Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from
even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every
blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable
than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my
broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and
things generally kept gettin' no better right along hour after hour.

"There wasn't a chance in a million that anybody would hear, but I kept
firin' off my forty-five on the off hope. And just before night a girl
on a _pinto_ came down the side of that uncurried hill round a bend and
got me. She took me to a cabin hidden in the bottom of a canon and
looked after me four days. Her father, a prospector, had gone into
Tucson for supplies and we were alone there. She fed me, nursed me,
and waited on me. We divided a one-room twelve-by-sixteen cabin.
Understand, we were four days alone together before her dad came back,
and all the time the sky was lettin' down a terrible lot of water.
When her father showed up he grinned and said, 'Lucky for you