Bonita turned to him with slow grace. The eyes of the man and the woman met and fought. In hers there was a kind of savage fierceness, in his an insolent confidence.
"No," she answered.
"Ah! You're afraid of me—afraid to trust yourself with me," he boasted.
She was an untutored child of the desert, and his words were a spur to her quick pride. She rose at once, her bosom rising and falling fast. She would never confess that—never.
The girl walked beside him with the fluent grace of youth, beautiful as a forest fawn. In ten years she would be fat and slovenly like her Mexican mother, but now she carried her slender body as a queen is supposed to but does not. Her heel sank into a little patch of mud where some one had watered a horse. Under the cottonwoods she pulled up her skirt a trifle and made a moue of disgust at the soiled slipper.
"See what you've done!" Small, even teeth, gleamed in a coquettish smile from the ripe lips of the little mouth. He understood that he was being invited to kneel and clean the mud-stained shoe.
"If you're looking for a doormat to wipe your feet on, I'll send for Tony," he jeered.
The father of Bonita was Anglo-Saxon. She flashed anger at his presumption.
"Don't you think it. Tony will never be a doormat to anybody. Be warned, señor, and do not try to take what is his."
Again their eyes battled. Neither of them saw a man who had come out from the house and was watching them from the end of the porch.