Percy stood near to her in the kitchen at Rattlesnake Ranch. He had one of a litter of bull pups on the dresser beside him, and was tempting the fat, ungainly animal to take more nourishment than it needed from a saucer of milk. He looked at the girl very closely and his eyes lingered, not for the first time, upon a curious scar in the smooth skin of her right temple. It was a long, very straight scar, that ran into the midst of the ebony black hair above her ear.
"Maple Leaf!" he said, after a considerable pause.
"Well?" She glanced aside at him.
"I've often wanted to ask you," he went on. "How did you get that wound on your temple? It's like the cut of a knife. It must have been a good deal more than a scratch to leave a mark like that. How was it done?"
Maple Leaf continued with her work of peeling and quartering apples. She had turned her back to him.
"Don't you want to tell me?" he asked. "Indians are usually proud of their wounds. At least, the men are, the chiefs and warriors and braves. I don't know about the women. Perhaps you got yours in some childish accident?"
"I have never told any one," she answered. And then, after a pause, she added: "And I am not going to. It is my secret. It is no business of yours."
Percy laughed awkwardly, feeling the rebuff, and took up his wriggling bull pup.
"All right," he said, knowing by experience that Maple Leaf was like the rest of her race and that wild horses couldn't drag from her anything that she did not wish to tell. "You can keep your secret, for all I care. But I could easily find out if I wanted, you know. I could even ask Sergeant Silk. I daresay Silk knows. There isn't much that he doesn't know about you and every one else on the Rattlesnake patrol."