"Hush! Don't you see someone has come? You've been drinking; and you're sickening to me."
"I don't care if someone is there! Let 'em hear, Louise. Let all the world hear, let your father hear, let anybody hear! Because I love you, and so you must come to the dance." Suddenly his tone changed to an angry hiss. "You've been treating me like a cur, refusing to see me or go with me, and not letting me come here. I came to-night! I've stood for enough from you; you can't play me for a fool any longer. And you're going to marry me, too."
Bryant perceived by the lamplight of the doorway that the fellow had snatched her hand, that the two were struggling. Burdened with Imogene as he was, Lee was helpless to enterfere. But he went hastily up the steps toward them. Louise tugged herself free.
"Oh, you contemptible creature!" she cried, in a voice of quivering passion. "It's only because you know father is out caring for stock that you dare stay here to insult me." Then looking past Menocal, she exclaimed, "Who is that?"
"I, Bryant," said Lee. "With Imogene. She's ill, she needs to be put to bed. There was no time to ask your permission to bring her, but I knew——"
"Of course! If this beast will stop making a scene and go!"
Charlie Menocal was pulling on his fur cap.
"So here's our swell-headed crook of an engineer butting in again," he sneered. "You better be hunting up your own chicken, or Gretzinger will have her. Who y' say you got there?"
"Stand aside!"
Bryant's voice struck the other like the lash of a whip, and the half-drunken youth instinctively fell back a pace, so that Lee could pass with his charge into the house. But as Louise was about to follow Menocal seized her arm.