“You can't go. It isn't necessary.”
“Sho! Of course it's necessary. Think I'm going to buy a hawss I've never seen?” he asked, with deep innocence.
“I'll bring it here.”
“In Texas, ma'am, we wait on the ladies. Still, it's your say-so when you're behind that big gun.”
He said it laughing, and she threw the weapon angrily into the seat of the rig.
“Thank you, ma'am. I'll amble down and see what's behind the hill.”
By the flinch in her eyes he tested his center shot and knew it true. Her breast was rising and falling tumultuously. A shiver ran through her.
“No—no. I'm not hiding—anything,” she gasped.
“Then if you're not you can't object to my going there.”
She caught her hands together in despair. There was about him something masterful that told her she could not prevent him from investigating; and it was impossible to guess how he would act after he knew. The men she had known had been bound by convention to respect a woman's wishes, but even her ignorance of his type made guess that this steel-eyed, close-knit young Westerner—or was he a Southerner?—would be impervious to appeals founded upon the rules of the society to which she had been accustomed. A glance at his stone-wall face, at the lazy confidence of his manner, made her dismally aware that the data gathered by her experience of the masculine gender were insufficient to cover this specimen.