"You know I didn't mean that, little pal." His sunny smile was disarming. "What I mean is that he's sorry for what he did. Why not give him a chance to be friends?"
"Well, we gave him a chance to-night, didn't we? And he chose not to take it. What do you want me to do—go and thank him kindly for having me whipped?"
Beresford gave up with a shrug. He knew when he had said enough. Some day the seed he had dropped might germinate.
"Wouldn't it be a good idea to work a W.B. on that case?" he asked with friendly impudence. "Then if I lost it, whoever found it could return it."
"I don't give presents to people who lose them," she parried.
Her dancing eyes were very bright as they met his. She loved the trim lines of his clean beautiful youth and the soul expressed by them.
Matapi-Koma waddled into the room and the Mounted Policeman transferred his attention to her. She weighed two hundred twelve pounds, but was not sensitive on the subject. Beresford claimed anxiously that she was growing thin.
The Indian woman merely smiled on him benignantly. She liked him, as all women did. And she hoped that he would stay in the country and marry Sleeping Dawn.