"I don't know!" she gasped.
"I must ask," he added, thoughtfully.
Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray was twinkling enjoyably into hers.
"You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his desperado pride. You are marked—don't you see, marked?" she persisted. "And I brought it on! I am responsible!"
He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy.
"Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle gets it all, just as you said."
This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her next remark.
"I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!" she stormed.
"That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a dry climate."
She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead.