“Nonsense! I simply ask you to come to see me when you find time.”
“Why?”
The query once heard was not so embarrassing to Jane as she might have imagined. Moreover, it established in her mind a fact that there existed actually other than selfish reasons for her wanting to see him. And as she had been bold, so she determined to be both honest and brave.
“I’ve reasons—only one of which I need mention,” she answered. “If it’s possible I want to change you toward my people. And on the moment I can conceive of little I wouldn’t do to gain that end.”
How much better and freer Jane felt after that confession! She meant to show him that there was one Mormon who could play a game or wage a fight in the open.
“I reckon,” said Lassiter, and he laughed.
It was the best in her, if the most irritating, that Lassiter always aroused.
“Will you come?” She looked into his eyes, and for the life of her could not quite subdue an imperiousness that rose with her spirit. “I never asked so much of any man—except Bern Venters.”
“’Pears to me that you’d run no risk, or Venters, either. But mebbe that doesn’t hold good for me.”
“You mean it wouldn’t be safe for you to be often here? You look for ambush in the cottonwoods?”