“He’s been doubly sore at us ever since I turned him down. I looked for him to come over and shoot up my camp some night for a long time, but I guess he isn’t that bad.”
“So much to his credit.”
“But I wish sometimes I’d gone with him. Maybe it would have straightened things out. You know, when you stay here on the range, Mr. Mackenzie, you’re on a level with everybody else, no matter what you think of yourself. You can’t get out of the place they make for you in their estimation of you. Hector Hall never 62 will believe I’m too good to go to a dance with him. He’ll be sore about it all his life.”
“A man naturally would have regrets, Miss Sullivan. Maybe that’s as far as it goes with Hector Hall, maybe he’s only sore at heart for the honor denied.”
“That don’t sound like real talk,” said Joan.
Mackenzie grinned at the rebuke, and the candor and frankness in which it was administered, thinking that Joan would have a frigid time of it out in the world if she applied such outspoken rules to its flatteries and mild humbugs.
“Let’s be natural then,” he suggested, considering as he spoke that candor was Joan’s best defense in her position on the range. Here she sat out under the stars with him, miles from the nearest habitation, miles from her father’s house, her small protector asleep in the wagon, and thought no more of it than a chaperoned daughter of the city in an illuminated drawing-room. A girl had to put men in their places and keep them there under such circumstances, and nobody knew better how to do it than Joan.
“I’ll try your patience and good humor when you start out to teach me,” she told him, “for I’ll want to run before I learn to walk.”
“We’ll see how it goes in a few days; I’ve sent for the books.”
“I’ll make a good many wild breaks,” she said, “and tumble around a lot, I know, but there won’t be anybody to laugh at me––but you.” She paused as if considering the figure she would make at the tasks she awaited with such impatience, then added under her breath, 63 almost in a whisper, as if it was not meant for him to hear: “But you’ll never laugh at me for being hungry to learn.”