“You’re perfectly silly! He didn’t look at me any differently than any other man does.”
“I don’t know about that. I haven’t the same keen desire to punch the head of every man I see looking at you as I had in his case.”
“Oh, you’re prejudiced! I’ll bet anything he’s just perfectly lovely!”
Next morning, finding no one with the leisure or inclination to ride with her, Eva rode up again to the camp. They had already commenced shooting. Although Crumb was busy, he courteously took the time to explain the scene on which they were working, and many of the technical details of picture making. He had a man hold her horse while she came and squinted through the finder. In fact, he spent so much time with her that he materially delayed the work of the morning. At the same time the infatuation that had had its birth on the preceding day grew to greater proportions in his diseased mind.
He asked her to stay and lunch with them. When she insisted that she must return home, he begged her to come again in the afternoon. Although she would have been glad to do so, for she found the work that they were doing novel and interesting, she declined his invitation, as she already had made arrangements for the afternoon.
He followed her to her horse, and walked beside her down the road a short distance from the others.
“If you can’t come down this afternoon,” he said, “possibly you can come up this evening. We are going to take some night pictures. I hadn’t intended inviting any one, because the work is going to be rather difficult and dangerous, and an audience might distract the attention of the actors; but if you think you could get away alone, I should be very glad to have you come up for a few minutes about nine o’clock. We shall be working in the same place. Don’t forget,” he repeated, as she started to ride away, “that for this particular scene I really ought not to have any audience at all; so if you come, please don’t tell any one else about it.”
“I’ll come,” she said. “It’s awfully good of you to ask me, and I won’t tell a soul.”
Crumb smiled as he turned back to his waiting company.
Brought up in the atmosphere that had surrounded her since birth, unacquainted with any but honorable men, and believing as she did that all men are the chivalrous protectors of all women, Eva did not suspect the guile that lay behind the director’s courteous manner and fair words. She looked upon the coming nocturnal visit to the scene of their work as nothing more than a harmless adventure; nor was there, from her experience, any cause for apprehension, since the company comprised some forty or fifty men and women who, like any one else, would protect her from any harm that lay in their power to avert.