"But even for your own sake——" She stopped, intuitively aware that this was not the ground upon which to treat with him. He would never drop the charges against the Mexicans merely because there was danger in pressing them.
"I reckon I'll have to try to look out for myself. Maybe next time I won't be so easy a mark," he answered with an almost insolent laugh.
Valencia was a little puzzled. Things were not going right, and she did not quite know the reason. There was just a touch of bitterness in his voice, of aloofness in his manner. She did not know that the sight of the solitaire sparkling on her left hand stirred in him the impulse to hurt her, to refuse rather than concede her requests.
"You're not going to push the cases against Pablo and Sebastian and still try to live in the valley, are you?" she asked, beginning to feel a little irritation at him.
"That's just what I'm going to do."
"You mustn't. I won't have it. Don't you see what my people will think, that because Pablo and Sebastian were loyal to me——"
His acrid smile cut her sentence in two. "That's about the third time you've mentioned their loyalty. Me, I don't see it. Sebastian owns land under the Valdés grant. He didn't want me to take it from him. Mr. Pablo Menendez—well, he had private reasons of his own, too."
The resentment flamed in her heart. If he was shameless enough to refer to the affair with Juanita she would let him know that she knew.
"What were his reasons, Mr. Gordon—that is, if they are not a private affair between you and him?"
"Not at all." The steel-blue eyes met hers, steadily. Dick was yielding to a desire to hurt himself as well as her, to defy her judgment if she had no better sense than to condemn him. "The idiot is jealous."