side, their stirrups clashing. Distorted as her features were
by anger and scorn at the touch of one so despised, Lambert felt his
heart leap and fall, and seem to stand still in his bosom. It was not
only a girl; it was _his_ girl, the girl of the beckoning hand.

CHAPTER XII

THE FURY OF DOVES

Lambert released her the moment that he made his double discovery,
foolishly shaken, foolishly hurt, to realize that she had been afraid to
have him know it was a woman he pursued. He caught her rein and checked
her horse along with his own.

"There's no use to run away from me," he said, meaning to quiet her
fear. She faced him scornfully, seemingly to understand it as a boast.

"You wouldn't say that to a man, you coward!"

Again he felt a pang, like a blow from an ungrateful hand. She was
breathing fast, her dark eyes spiteful, defiant, her face eloquent of
the scorn that her words had only feebly expressed. He turned his head,
as if considering her case and revolving in his mind what punishment to
apply.

She was dressed in riding breeches, with Mexican goatskin chaps, a heavy
gray shirt such as was common to cowboys, a costly white sombrero, its
crown pinched to a peak in the Mexican fashion. With the big
handkerchief on her neck flying as she rode, and the crouching posture
that she had assumed in the saddle every time her pursuer began to close
up on her in the race just ended, Lambert's failure to identify her sex
was not so inexcusable as might appear. And he was thinking that she had
been afraid to have him know she was a girl.

His discovery had left him dumb, his mind confused by a cross-current of
emotions. He was unable to relate her with the present situation,
although she was unmistakably before his eyes, her disguise ineffectual
to change one line of her body as he recalled her leaning over the
railing of the car, her anger unable to efface one feature as pictured
in his memory.

"What are you going to do about it?" she asked him defiantly, not a hint
in her bearing of shame for her discovery, or contrition for her crime.

"I guess you'd better go home."

He spoke in gentle reproof, as to a child caught in some trespass
well-nigh unforgivable, but to whose offense he had closed his eyes out
of considerations which only the forgiving understand. He looked her
full in the eyes as he spoke, the disappointment and pain of his
discovery in his face. The color blanched out of her cheeks, she sta