He did not look away immediately, as he should have done, and Billy Louise felt a little heat-wave of embarrassment, emphasized by resentment.
"Are you going far?" he queried in the same tone he had employed before.
"Six miles," she answered shortly, though she tried to be decently civil.
"I've about eighteen," he said. "Looks like we'll both get caught out in a blizzard."
Certainly, he had a pleasant enough voice—and after all it was not his fault that he happened to be at the crossing when she rode out of the gorge. Billy Louise, in common justice, laid aside her resentment and looked at him with a hint of a smile at the corners of her lips.
"That's what we have to expect when we travel in this country in the winter," she replied. "Eighteen miles will take you long after dark."
"Well, I was sort of figuring on putting up at some ranch, if it got too bad. There's a ranch somewhere ahead, on the Wolverine, isn't there?"
"Yes." Billy Louise bit her lip; but hospitality is an unwritten law of the West—a law not to be lightly broken. "That's where I live. We'll be glad to have you stop there, of course."
The stranger must have felt and admired the unconscious dignity of her tone and words, for he thanked her simply and refrained from looking too intently at her face.
Fine siftings of snow, like meal flung down from a gigantic sieve, swept into their faces as they rode on. The man turned his face toward her after a long silence. She was riding with bowed head and face half turned from him and the wind alike.