It was the impatient porter who interrupted them. The girl sprang up tremulously to accept.
"Oh, please. Is it late?" Her glance swept down the car and took in the fact that her section alone was not made up. "I didn't know—why, what time is it?"
"Most twelve, ma'am," replied the aggrieved porter severely.
She flashed a look of reproach at her companion and blushed again as she fled with her bag to the ladies' dressing-room. As for the man, Lindsay presently came on him in the smoking-room where he sat with an unlit cigar between his teeth and his feet on a chair. Behind half-shuttered lids his opaque eyes glittered with excitement. Clearly he was reviewing in his mind the progression of his triumph. Clay restrained a good, healthy impulse to pick a row with him and go to the mat with the ex-prize-fighter. But after all it was none of his business.
The train was rolling through the cornfields of the Middle West when the Arizonan awoke. He was up early, but not long before Kitty Mason, who was joined at once by Durand.
"Shucks! Nothin' to it a-tall," the range-rider assured himself. "That li'l' girl sure must have the number of this guy. She's flirtin' with him to beat three of a kind, but I'll bet a dogie she knows right where she's at."
Clay did not in the least believe his own argument. If he had come from a city he would have dismissed the matter as none of his business. But he came from the clean Southwest where every straight girl is under the protection of every decent man. If she was in danger because of her innocence it was up to him to look after her. There was no more competent man in Graham County than Clay Lindsay, but he recognized that this was a delicate affair in which he must move warily.
On his way to the diner at noon the range-rider passed her again. She was alone for the moment and as she leaned back her soft round throat showed a beating pulse. Her cheeks were burning and her starry eyes were looking into the future with a happy smile.
"You pore little maverick," the man commented silently.
The two had the table opposite him. As the wheels raced over a culvert to the comparative quiet of the ballasted track beyond, the words of the man reached Clay.