He laughed as he caught hold of the rein. “That's ridiculous!”
“But my business, I think,” the girl answered sharply, jerking the bridle from his fingers.
Dunke stared at her. It was his night of surprises. He failed to recognize the conventional teacher he knew in this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman who fronted him so sure of herself. She seemed to him to swim brilliantly in a tide of flushed beauty, in spite of the dust and the stains of travel. She was in a shapeless khaki riding-suit and a plain, gray, broad-brimmed Stetson. But the one could not hide the flexible curves that made so frankly for grace, nor the other the coppery tendrils that escaped in fascinating disorder from under its brim.
“You hadn't ought to be out here. It ain't right.”
“I don't remember asking you to act as a standard of right and wrong for me.”
He laughed awkwardly. “We ain't quarreling, are we, Miss Margaret?”
“Certainly I am not. I don't quarrel with anybody but my friends.”
“Well, I didn't aim to offend you anyway. You know me better than that.” He let his voice fall into a caressing modulation and put a propitiatory hand on her skirt, but under the uncompromising hardness of her gaze the hand fell away to his side. “I'm your friend—leastways I want to be.”
“My friends don't lynch men.”
“But after what he did to your brother.”