ld the caitiff attempt thy unguarded innocence--'"

"Did ye hear what your father was sayin'?" Lanty started. It was her
mother's voice in the doorway, and she had been vaguely conscious of
another voice pitched in the same querulous key, which, indeed, was the
dominant expression of the small ranchers of that fertile neighborhood.
Possibly a too complaisant and unaggressive Nature had spoiled them.

"Yes!--no!" said Lanty abstractedly, "what did he say?"

"If you wasn't taken up with that fool book," said Mrs. Foster, glancing
at her daughter's slightly conscious color, "ye'd know! He allowed
ye'd better not leave yer filly in the far pasture nights. That gang
o' Mexican horse-thieves is out again, and raided McKinnon's stock last
night."

This touched Lanty closely. The filly was her own property, and she
was breaking it for her own riding. But her distrust of her parents'
interference was greater than any fear of horse-stealers. "She's mighty
uneasy in the barn; and," she added, with a proud consciousness of that
beautiful yet carnal weapon upstairs, "I reckon I ken protect her and
myself agin any Mexican horse-thieves."

"My! but we're gettin' high and mighty," responded Mrs. Foster, with
deep irony. "Did you git all that outer your fool book?"

"Mebbe," said Lanty curtly.

Nevertheless, her thoughts that night were not entirely based on written
romance. She wondered if the stranger knew that she had really tried to
box his ears in the darkness, also if he had been able to see her face.
HIS she remembered, at least the flash of his white teeth against his
dark face and darker mustache, which was quite as soft as her own hair.
But if he thought "for a minnit" that she was "goin' to allow an entire
stranger to kiss her--he was mighty mistaken." She should let him know
it "pretty quick"! She should hand him back the dagger "quite careless
like," and never let on that she'd thought anything of it. Perhaps that
was the reason why, before she went to bed, she took a good look at it,
and after taking off her straight, beltless, calico gown she even tried
the effect of it, thrust in the stiff waistband of her petticoat, with
the jeweled hilt displayed, and thought it looked charming--as indeed it
did. And then, having said her prayers like a good girl, and supplicated
that she should be less "tetchy" with her parents, she went to sleep and
dreamed that she had gone out to take in the wash again, but that the
clothes