"I think," she responded, showing her aversion in every syllable, "before a man begins to talk red-blood rot, he ought to find out whether the girl cares for him, or just loathes the sight of him." He regarded her fixedly. Paying no attention to him, but bending in the sunshine over her sewing, her hand flying with the needle, her masses of brown hair sweeping back around her pink ears and curling in stray ringlets that the wind danced with while she worked, she inflamed her brawny cousin's ardor afresh. "You used to care for me, Nan. You can't deny that." Her silence was irritating. "Can you?" he demanded. "Come, put up your work and talk it out. I didn't use to have to coax you for a word and a smile. What's come over you?" "Nothing has come over me, Gale. I did use to like you--when I first came back from school. You seemed so big and fine then, and were so nice to me. I did like you." "Why didn't you keep on liking me?" Nan made no answer. Her cousin persisted. "You used to talk about thinking the world of me," she said at last; "then I saw you one Frontier Day, riding around Sleepy Cat with a carriage full of women." Gale burst into a huge laugh. Nan's face flushed. She bent over her work. "Oh, that's what's the matter with you, is it?" he demanded jocularly. "You never mentioned _that_ before." "That isn't the only thing," she continued after a pause. "Why, that was just some Frontier Day fun, Nan. A man's got to be a little bit of a sport once in a while, hasn't he?" "Not if he likes me." She spoke with an ominous distinctness, but under her breath. He caught her words and laughed again. "Pshaw, I didn't think you'd get jealous over a little thing like that, Nan. When there's a celebration on in town, everybody's friendly with everybody else. If you lay a little thing like that up against me, where would the rest of the men get off? Your strawberry-faced Medicine Bend friend is celebrating in town most of the time." Her face turned white. "What a falsehood!" she exclaimed hotly. Looking at her, satisfied, he laughed whole-heartedly again. She rose, furious. "It's a falsehood," she repeated, "and I know it." "I suppose," retorted Gale, regarding her jocosely, "you asked him about it." He had never seen her so angry. She stamped her foot. "How dare you say such a thing! One of those women was at the hospital--she is there yet, and she is going to die there. She told Uncle Duke's nurse the men they knew, and whom they didn't know, at that place. And Henry de Spain, when he heard this miserable creature had been taken to the hospital, and Doctor Torpy said she could never get well, told the Sister to take care of her and send the bills to him, because he knew her father and mother in Medicine Bend and went to school with her there when she was a decent girl. Go and hear what _she_ has to say about Henry de Spain, you contemptible falsifier."