“No, Bob Dillon.” Her dark eyes met his fairly. “Oh, Bob, I’m so glad.”
He was suddenly flooded with self-consciousness. “About us preëmptin’?” he asked.
“No. About you being the hero of the campaign.”
The ranger was miserably happy. He was ashamed to have the thing he had done dragged into the light, embarrassed to hear her use so casually a word that made him acutely uncomfortable. Yet he would not for the world have missed the queer little thrills that raced through him.
“That’s plumb foolishness,” he said.
“Yes, it is—not. Think I haven’t heard all about it? How you dragged Jake Houck into the willows right spang from among the Utes? How you went to the river an’ got him water? How you went for help when everybody thought you’d be killed? An’ how you shamed Dud into going back with you? I made Mr. Harshaw tell me all he knew—and Dud too. He said—Mr. Harshaw said—”
Bob interrupted this eager attack. “I’ll tell you how it was, June. When I saw Houck lying out there with a busted leg I didn’t know who he was—thought maybe it was Dud. So I had to go an’ get him. If I’d known it was Houck—”
“You knew it was Houck before you dragged him back, didn’t you?” she charged. “You knew it when you went to the river to get him water?”
“Truth is, I was scared so I shook,” he confessed humbly. “But when a fellow’s sufferin’ like Jake Houck was—”