“I shouldn’t,” Inez replied. “I have been on the road with father a good many times and nothing happened, but if there did I shouldn’t be afraid. I’d fly at the robber and try to kill him. Father laughs when I talk that way and says there is murder in my Gypsy blood. Perhaps there is. Any way I would not hesitate to kill a man who was robbing a coach. I’d shoot him like a dog.”
Her mood had changed as she talked. The softness had left her eyes which blazed and flashed defiantly, and she took a turn or two across the room as if she were in fancy battling with some desperado.
“Don’t look so fierce. You scare me,” Fanny said, when Inez came back and resumed her chair.
“Do I? I cannot tell you how I feel when I think of the bandits who make our beautiful valley a dread to tourists who visit it. But they may not be there at all this summer. Don’t worry about them. Leave your valuables here, especially your diamonds, if you have any. Then, if you are held up you have not so much to lose. If I knew when you were coming I believe I’d meet you in Milton, where you take the stage, or have father do it. He isn’t afraid. He goes home to-morrow or next day. Tom has already gone. I go in two or three weeks. You must come to our cottage. It is lovely.”
Inez’s face was a very changeable one, now grave and serious and sad, then sunny and sweet, with a smile which changed its whole expression. Like most communicative people she was very inquisitive, and having told all there was to tell about herself she asked Fanny about herself, her home in New York, and how old she was. “I am seventeen,” she said.
“And I am twenty. I thought you older,” Fanny replied, in some surprise.
“So does every one, because I am so tall and big, like my father. Where is your father?” Inez asked.
“He is dead,” Fanny replied, thinking of both Mark Hilton and Judge Prescott.
“Oh, I am so sorry for you; but you have a mother, and mine is lying among the hills,” Inez said, beginning to talk again of her home and her hope that Fanny would visit her when she came to the valley. “You must,” she continued. “I want you to see our cottage and mother’s grave, and father and Nero and everything. If you will let me see your mother I will ask her for you. People nearly always do what I wish them to.”
Fanny could not promise for her mother. To her Inez was a frank, simple-hearted girl, a little too forward, perhaps, but this came of her surrounding circumstances and not from any innate ill-breeding. Mrs. Prescott would probably think differently.