Armitage was silent, a look of great perplexity on his face. When he spoke he was quite calm.
“Miss Claiborne, I must tell you that this is an affair in which I can’t ask help in the usual channels. You will pardon me if I seem to make a mystery of what should be ordinarily a bit of business between myself and the police; but to give publicity to these attempts to injure me just now would be a mistake. I could have caught that man there in the wood; but I let him go, for the reason—for the reason that I want the men back of him to show themselves before I act. But if it isn’t presuming—”
He was quite himself again. His voice was steady and deep with the ease and assurance that she liked in him. She had marked to-day in his earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.
“How am I to know whether it would be presuming?” she asked.
“But I was going to say—”
“When rudely interrupted!” She was trying to make it easy for him to say whatever he wished.
“—that these troubles of mine are really personal. I have committed no crime and am not fleeing from justice.”
She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road near the park limits.
“How uninteresting! We expect a Montana ranchman to have a spectacular past.”
“But not to carry it, I hope, to Washington. On the range I might become a lawless bandit in the interest of picturesqueness; but here—”