"I suppose I didn't act much like a woman out there a while ago," she admitted, her old expression of sadness darkening in her eyes.
"You were a couple of wildcats," he told her. "Maybe we can get on here now without fighting, but if they come crowding it on let us men-folks take care of it for you; it's no job for a girl."
"I'm going to put the thought of it out of my mind, feud, fences, everything—and turn it all over to you. It's asking a lot of you to assume, but I'm tired to the heart."
"I'll do the best by you I can as long as I'm here," he promised, simply. He started on; she rode forward with him.
"If she comes back again, what will you do?"
"I'll try to show her where she's wrong, and maybe I can get her to hang up her gun, too. You ought to be friends, it seems to me—a couple of neighbor girls like you."
"We couldn't be that," she said, loftily, her old coldness coming over her momentarily, "but if we can live apart in peace it will be something. Don't trust her, Mr. Lambert, don't take her word for anything. There's no honor in the Kerr blood; you'll find that out for yourself. It isn't in one of them to be even a disinterested friend."
There was nothing for him to say to this, spoken so seriously that it seemed almost a prophecy. He felt as if she had looked into the window of his heart and read his secret and, in her old enmity for this slim girl of the dangling braid of hair, was working subtly to raise a barrier of suspicion and distrust between them.
"I'll go on home and quit bothering you," she said.
"You're no bother to me, Vesta; I like to have you along."