utiful eyes--respectfully, admiringly, and
strategically. For he was quite convinced that if he DID move she
would certainly discharge one or both barrels at him.

"Where's the rest of you?" she continued sharply.

"About three hundred yards away, in the covert, not near enough to
trouble you."

"Will they come here?"

"I trust not."

"You trust not?" she repeated scornfully. "Why?

"Because they would be disobeying orders."

She lowered her gun slightly, but kept her black brows levelled at him.
"I reckon I'm a match for YOU," she said, with a slightly contemptuous
glance at his slight figure, and opened the door. For a moment they
stood looking at each other. He saw, besides the handsome face and
eyes that had charmed him, a tall slim figure, made broader across the
shoulders by an open pea-jacket that showed a man's red flannel shirt
belted at the waist over a blue skirt, with the collar knotted by a
sailor's black handkerchief, and turned back over a pretty though
sunburnt throat. She saw a rather undersized young fellow in a jaunty
undress uniform, scant of gold braid, and bearing only the single gold
shoulder-bars of his rank, but scrupulously neat and well fitting.
Light-colored hair cropped close, the smallest of light moustaches,
clear and penetrating blue eyes, and a few freckles completed a picture
that did not prepossess her. She was therefore the more inclined to
resent the perfect ease and self-possession with which the stranger
carried off these manifest defects before her.

She laid aside the gun, put her hands deep in the pockets of her
pea-jacket, and, slightly squaring her shoulders, said curtly, "What do
you want?"

"A very little information, which I trust it will not trouble you to
give me. My men have just discovered the uniform belonging to a
deserter from the Fort lying in the bushes yonder. Can you give me the
slightest idea how it came there?"

"What right have you trapseing over our property?" she said, turning
upon him sharply, with a slight paling of color.

"None whatever."

"Then what did you come for?"

"To ask that permission, in case you would give me no information."

"Why don't you ask my brother, and not a woman? Were you afraid?"

"He could hardly have done me the honor of placing me in more peril
than you have," returned Calvert, smiling. "Then I have the pleasure
of addressing Miss Culpepper?"

"I'm Jim Culpepper's sister."

"And, I believe, equal