"And you knew all this an hour ago!" she accused him incoherently. "Knew my predicament--knew my inevitable weakness and fear and mortification--knew me a stranger among strangers. And yet you came up here to jolly me inconsequently--about a million foolish things!" "It was because at the end of the hour I hoped to be something to you that would quite prevent your feeling a 'stranger among strangers,'" said Guthrie very quietly. "I have asked you to marry me this afternoon, you must remember." The young woman's lip curled tremulously. "You astonish me!" she scoffed. "I had always understood that men did not marry very easily. Quick to love, slow to marry, is supposed to be your most striking characteristic--and here are you asking marriage of me, and you haven't even loved me yet!" "You women do not seem to marry any too easily," smiled Guthrie gazing nervously from his open watch to the furthest corner of the corral, where the preacher's raw-boned pony, nose in air, was stubbornly refusing to take his bit. "Indeed we do marry--perfectly easily--when we once love," retorted the woman contentiously! "It's the love part of it that we are reluctant about!" "But I haven't asked you to love me," protested the man with much patience. "I merely asked you to marry me." The woman's jaw dropped. "Out of sympathy for my emergency, out of mistaken chivalry, you're asking me to marry you, and not even pretending that you love me?" she asked in astonishment. "I haven't had time to love you yet. I've only known you such a little while," said the man quite simply. Almost sternly he rose and began to pace up and down the narrow confines of the little piazza. "All I know is," he asserted, "that the very first moment you stepped off the train at Laramie, I knew you were the woman whom I was--going to love--sometime." Very softly he slid back into the rustic seat he had just vacated, and taking the woman's small clenched hands in his began to smooth out her fingers like poor crumpled ribbons. "Now, Little Psychology Teacher," he said, "I want you to listen very, very carefully to everything I say. Do you like me all right?" "Y--e--s." "Better than you like Andrews or Ellis or even the old Judge?" "Oh, yes!" "Ever since we all started out together on the Trail you've just sort of naturally fallen to my lot, haven't you? Whenever you needed your pony's girth tightened, or whenever you wanted a drink of water, or whenever the big canyons scared you, or whenever the camp fire smoked you, you've just sort of naturally turned to me, haven't you? And it would be fair enough, wouldn't it, to say that at least I've never made any situation worse for you? So that if anything ugly or awkward were going to happen--perhaps you really would rather have me around than any one else?" "Yes--surely."