“Oh, you lamb—you precious lamb,” he groaned, and clicked his teeth shut on the poignant pain of his loss.
“I think you’re splendid,” she told him. “Oh, I know what you’ve done—that you are not good. I know you’ve wasted your life and lived with your hand against every man’s. But I can’t help all that. I look for the good in you, and I find it. Even in your sins you are not petty. You know how to rise to an opportunity.”
This man of contradictions, forever the creature of his impulses, gave the lie to her last words by signally failing to rise to this one. He snatched her to him, and looked down hungry-eyed at her sweet beauty, as fresh and fragrant as the wild rose in the copse.
“Please,” she cried, straining from him with shy, frightened eyes.
For answer he kissed her fiercely on the cheeks, and eyes, and mouth.
“The rest are his, but these are mine,” he laughed mirthlessly.
Then, flinging her from him, he led the way into the next room. Flushed and disheveled, she followed. He had outraged her maiden instincts and trampled down her traditions of caste, but she had no time to think of this now.
“If you’re through explaining the mechanism of that Winchester to Sheriff Collins we’ll reluctantly dispense with your presence, Mr. Reilly. We have arranged a temporary treaty of peace,” the chief outlaw said.
Reilly, a huge lout of a fellow with a lowering countenance, ventured to expostulate. “Ye want to be careful of him. He’s quicker’n chain lightning.”
His chief exploded with low-voiced fury. “When I ask your advice, give it, you fat-brained son of a brand blotter. Until then padlock that mouth of yours. Vamos.”