The rustler had clear gray-yellow eyes, flawless, like, crystal, and suddenly they danced with little fiery flecks.
“The last time I laid my hand on y’u I got hit for my pains. An’ shore that’s been ranklin’.”
“Colter, y’u’ll get hit again if y’u put your hands on me,” she said, dark, straight glance on him. A frown wrinkled the level brows.
“Y’u mean that?” he asked, thickly.
“I shore, do.”
Manifestly he accepted her assertion. Something of incredulity and bewilderment, that had vied with his resentment, utterly disappeared from his face.
“Heah I’ve been waitin’ for y’u to love me,” he declared, with a gesture not without dignified emotion. “Your givin’ in without that wasn’t so much to me.”
And at these words of the rustler’s Jean Isbel felt an icy, sickening shudder creep into his soul. He shut his eyes. The end of his dream had been long in coming, but at last it had arrived. A mocking voice, like a hollow wind, echoed through that region—that lonely and ghost-like hall of his heart which had harbored faith.
She burst into speech, louder and sharper, the first words of which Jean’s strangely throbbing ears did not distinguish.
“— — you! ... I never gave in to y’u an’ I never will.”