He shook his head. “That’s not the same at all. I had to do that, and there was no risk to it. But you chose to save me, to risk your life for mine.”
She saw that he was greatly moved, and that his emotion had swept away the effects of the liquid as a fresh breeze does a fog.
“I didn’t know I was risking my life. I saw you didn’t see.”
“I didn’t think there was a woman alive had the pluck to do it—and for me, your enemy. That what you count me, isn’t it—an enemy?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite think of you as friend, can I?”
“And yet I would have protected you from any danger at any cost.”
“Except the danger of yourself,” she said, in low voice, meeting him eye to eye.
He accepted her correction with a groan, an wheeled away, leaning his arms on the corral fence and looking away to that saddle between the peak which still glowed with sunset light.
“I haven’t met a woman of your kind before in ten years,” he said presently. “I’ve lived on your looks, your motions, the inflections of your voice. I suppose I’ve been starved for that sort of thing and didn’t know it till you came. It’s been like a glimpse of heaven to me.” He laughed bitterly: and went on: “Of course, I had to take to drinking and let you see the devil I am. When I’m sober you would be as safe with me as with York. But the excitement of meeting you—I have to ride my emotions to death so as to drain them to the uttermost. Drink stimulates the imagination, and I drank.”
“I’m sorry.”