"What you meetin' him for, then?" he asked suspiciously.
"I have not met Neal Taggart since the day you made him apologize to me," she said slowly.
"Who are you meetin', then?" he demanded.
She looked straight at him. "I cannot answer that," she said.
His lips curled with disbelief, and her cheeks flushed a little.
"Can't you trust anybody?" she said.
"Why," she continued as he kept silent, "don't you think that if I had intended, as you said once before, to cheat you, to take anything that belongs to you, that I could have done so long ago? I had the diagram; I could have kept the idol, the money, the ranch. What could you have done; what could you do now? Don't you think it is about time for you to realize that you are hurting no one but yourself by harboring such black, dismal thoughts. Nobody is trying to cheat you—except probably the Taggarts. Everybody here is trying their best to be friendly to you, trying to aid in making those reforms which your father mentioned. Dade likes you; Bob loves you. And even my grandfather said the other day that you are not a bad fellow. You have been making progress, more than I expected you to make. But you must make more."
The mirth had died out of her eyes; she was deeply in earnest. Calumet could see that, and the knowledge kept him silent, hushed the half-formed sarcastic replies that were on his lips, made his suspicions seem brutal, preposterous, ridiculous. There was much feeling in her voice; he was astonished and awed at the change in her; he had not seen her like this before. Her reserve was gone, the disdain with it; there was naked sincerity in her glowing eyes, in her words, in her manner. He watched her, fascinated, as she continued:
"I think you can see now that if I had wanted to be dishonest you could not have stopped me. My honesty proven, what must have been my motive in staying here to take your insults, to submit to your boorishness? I will tell you; you may believe me or not, as you please. I was grateful to your father. I gave him my promise. He wanted me to make a man of you.
"When you first came here, and I saw what a burden I had assumed, I was afraid. But I saw that you did not intend to take advantage of me; that you weren't like a good many men—brutes who prey on unprotected women; that only your temper was wanton. And instead of fearing you I began to pity you. I saw promise in you; you had manly impulses, but you hadn't had your chance. I had faith in you. To a certain extent you have justified that faith. You have shown flashes of goodness of heart; you have exhibited generous, manly sympathies—to everybody but me. But I do not care [there was a suspicious moisture in her eyes and a queer tightening of the lips that gave the lie to this declaration] how you treat me. I intend to keep my promise to your father, no matter what you do. But I want to make you understand that I am not the kind of woman you take me to be—that I am not being made a fool of by Neal Taggart—or by any man!"