Dan Norton rode closer toward her and for reply struck her pony sharply with his short riding whip. Tired little Hotspur quivered with pain, but stood still under his mistress' gentle words.
"Don't do that again, Dan," Jacqueline protested, feeling the hot blood rush to her face and then leave her cold and still with anger. "There is not another person in Wyoming who would be so rude to me. But there has been trouble enough between you and us. I shall not speak of this, but I shall never be able to forgive you to the longest day I live;" and Jacqueline's grey eyes looked so proudly and so scornfully into the boy's that his own dropped.
"Your way's to the left," he muttered. "If you ride quick, you will soon be on the boundary of your own ranch. Hurry, there is some one else coming this way."
Jacqueline did not stir. A few minutes before, she would have trotted off gladly. Now nothing would have induced her to go. She would not run away from her enemy. Indeed she preferred to explain her presence on his ranch to Mr. Norton.
In the silence between the two young people another voice entered, but it was not Mr. Norton's. Some one was singing.
Dan Norton rode hurriedly out of sight and Jacqueline lifted her rifle, letting it rest in her arm.
"If a body meet a body,
Comin' through the rye;
If a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?
Every lassie has her laddie,
Nane they say have—
"Oh!" the song stopped abruptly. The singer threw up both hands and burst into a merry boyish laugh. "I surrender in the name of—in the name of most anything, if you will only put down that gun," he declared. "Who would have thought of meeting a girl in these woods? Whatever are you doing here? Poaching? No, I believe you don't have game preserves in this country, so poaching isn't against your law." The stranger laughed, though he had taken off his hat and bowed courteously to his fellow traveler. "Please tell me, are you Rosalind in the forest of Arden? You look like her, although I never heard of her on horseback," he ended merrily.
Jacqueline bit her lips. The young man was evidently a newcomer in the neighborhood and at any other time Jacqueline would have liked him. He must have been about seventeen and was tall and slender, with light brown hair and clever brown eyes. His dress was that of a cowboy, but Jacqueline saw with a feeling of instant disdain that his clothes were too new and his face too white for him to have lived long in her country. Besides he did not ride or talk like a Westerner.
"I am Frank Kent, at your service," he explained, puzzled by Jacqueline's haughty silence. "I am an Englishman and I don't quite know what I ought to do or say out in Wyoming. But may I be of any service to you?"