“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively. Then, again with the mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you think?”
Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her see the flush her words evoked.
“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not such a coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the miner man got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”
“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest things, sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter, really.”
“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with a hold-up on the way out here this evening—and got the best of him, too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief battle and its outcome.
“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of attempted highway robbery.
“What part have I left out?”
“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy the square meal—I’m sure you did.”
“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I don’t know why I did it, but I did.”
“I know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t help it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you—it appeals to me just in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock gone to seed. Couldn’t you see that?”