"To be my slave!" he shouted at her. "Proud, are you? So much the better. I swore to make you pay, and you begin paying now. Yes, as my slave as long as I like!"
"And you call yourself a man!"
"I call myself the best man that ever came into this wilderness country," he told her impudently. "If you are in doubt, bring on any other man of your choice and ask him, with your pretty smiles, if he cares to stand up against me! Yes, a man who goes rough-shod over everything and anything and anybody who stands in his way...."
"Boaster!" she named him scornfully.
He laughed loudly at that.
"I am no boaster and in your heart you know it!... There's another damn-fool convention for you, that business of great modesty! A man who is sure of himself doesn't have to walk easy and talk easy, but can tell other men what he is, and then, by glory, show 'em!"
Still she was scornful of him ... though she could not keep out of her thought that picture which he had made when, axe in hand, he had laid an armed jailer in the dust, and single-handed had made a jail delivery which hundreds of other men wanted to make and held back from ... through lack of that unrestricted confidence which was Bruce Standing's.
He was staring at her.
"You, too ... for a woman ... have courage," he muttered. And then, with a sudden arm flung out: "I'm hungry, I tell you."