He did not look at her and his manner had none of its usual bluntness; clearly he was evasive and, more, uncomfortable. "First, I want to thank you," Jane said after she had looked at him a moment. "You don't know how a woman such as I am can feel about a thing like that. I think it was the finest thing a man has ever done for me ... and many men have been trying to do fine things for me for a long time." She was deeply touched and her voice was not just steady but when Beck did not answer, just looked straight ahead with his tell-tale flush deepening, a delight crept into her eyes and the corners of her pretty mouth quirked. "Besides, it was a great deal to expect of a man who has made up his mind not to like me!" They had topped the divide and the sorrels had been fighting the bits. As she spoke Tom gave them their heads and the team swept the buckboard forward with a banging and clatter that would have drowned words anyhow, but the fact that he did not reply gave Jane a feeling of jubilation. Her thrust had pricked his reserve, showing it to be not wholly genuine! Dick Hilton had told her of the encounter Beck had had with Webb, told it jeeringly as he attempted to impress her with the distasteful phases of her environment. He had failed in that. He had impressed her only with the fact that Tom Beck had gone out of his way, had taken a chance, to protect her standing. Others of her men had heard her insulted, men from other ranches had been there, but of them all Beck had been her champion. And it was Beck who had bullied her, had doubted her in the face of her best efforts to convince him of fitness! He had even challenged her to make herself his friend! She had believed before she came into those hills that she knew men of all sorts but now she had found something new. Here was a man who, in her presence, would plot to humiliate her and yet when she could not see or hear his loyalty and his belief in her were outstanding. And what was it, she asked herself, that made her pulse leap and her throat tighten? It was not wholly gratitude. It was not merely because he resisted her efforts to win his open regard. Those things were potent influences, surely, but there was something more fundamental about him, a basic quality which she had not before encountered in men; she could not analyze it but daily she had sensed its growing strength. Now she felt it ... felt, but could not identify. Two-Bits opened the gate for them and Tom carried her bundles into the house. At the corral, as Beck unharnessed, the homely cow puncher said: "Gosh, Tommy, how'd it seem, ridin' all the way to town an' back with her settin' up beside you?" "Just about like you was there, Two-Bits, only we didn't swear quite so much." "I got lots of respect for you, Tommy, but I think you're a damned liar." And Beck chuckled to himself as though, perhaps, the other had been right.