“Oh, I can't fight the air, and I'm not going to try. What I've got to say, I prefer to say straight from the shoulder. I'm sick of this standing off and giving each other the bad eye over nothing. If we're going to stay on the same ranch, we might as well be friends. What do you say?” For a time he thought she was not going to say anything. She was staring at the dust-cloud ahead, and chewing absently at the corner of her under lip, and she kept it up so long that Good Indian began to scowl and call himself unseemly names for making any overture whatever. But, just as he turned toward her with lips half opened for a bitter sentence, he saw a dimple appear in the cheek next to him, and held back the words. “You told me you didn't like me,” she reminded, looking at him briefly, and afterward fumbling her reins. “You can't expect a girl--” “I suppose you don't remember coming up to me that first night, and calling me names, and telling me how you hated me, and--and winding up by pinching me?” he insinuated with hypocritical reproach, and felt of his arm. “If you could see the mark--” he hinted shamelessly. Evadna replied by pushing up her sleeve and displaying a scratch at least an inch in length, and still roughened and red. “I suppose you don't remember trying to MURDER me?” she inquired, sweetly triumphant. “If you could shoot as well as Jack, I'd have been killed very likely. And you'd be in jail this minute,” she added, with virtuous solemnity. “But you're not killed, and I'm not in jail.” “And I haven't told a living soul about it--not even Aunt Phoebe,” Evadna remarked, still painfully virtuous. “If I had--” “She'd have wondered, maybe, what you were doing away down there in the middle of the night,” Good Indian finished. “I didn't tell a soul, either, for that matter.” They left the meadowland and the broad stretch of barren sand and sage, and followed, at a leisurely pace, the winding of the trail through the scarred desolation where the earth had been washed for gold. Evadna stared absently at the network of deep gashes, evidently meditating very seriously. Finally she turned to Grant with an honest impulse of friendliness. “Well, I'm sure I'm willing to bury the tomahawk--er--that is, I mean--” She blushed hotly at the slip, and stammered incoherently. “Never mind.” His eyes laughed at her confusion. “I'm not as bad as all that; it doesn't hurt my feelings to have tomahawks mentioned in my presence.” Her cheeks grew redder, if that were possible, but she made no attempt to finish what she had started to say.