Nona smiled frankly at him and with him.
“You like to tease, don’t you?” she said simply. “You aren’t half so serious as you look and act.”
“Sometimes I’m even more so,” he drawled lightly.
“You were serious enough a while ago,” she said. Her next words startled Rock, they were so closely akin to what had been running in his mind not long before. “If Elmer hadn’t known you, there would have been a grand battle here. You and Charlie in the bunk house. I would probably have bought into it from one of the kitchen windows. I have dad’s old rifle, and I can shoot with it probably as straight as most men. They wouldn’t have won much from us. Buck Walters and his cowboys, I don’t think.”
“What makes you think Charlie would have backed me up?” he asked curiously.
“He did, didn’t he?” she asked. “I know that boy.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Of course I was scared,” she admitted. “But that didn’t paralyze me. It never does. Do you think I’d stand and wring my hands, while a man was fighting for his life?”
“I see,” Rock nodded. “Sort of united we stand, eh?”
“Well, neither Buck Walters nor anybody else will ever take a man out of my house and hang him to a cottonwood tree if I can stop it,” she said hotly. “There is law in this Territory, if it is not very much in evidence. They don’t have to take it in their own hands in that brutal way.”