He surprised himself almost as much as he did her by his answer. “I’m not yore friend.” She looked at him, startled at his brusqueness. “I’m a man that loves you,” he said roughly. A tremor passed through her. She was conscious of a strange sweet faintness. The soft eyes veiled themselves beneath dark lashes. “Have I spoiled everything, little partner?” he asked gently. “How can I tell—yet?” she whispered, and looked up at him shyly, tremulously. He knew, as his arms went around her, that he had entered upon the greatest joy of his life. CHAPTER VII FATE FLINGS OPEN A CLOSED DOOR ROWAN McCOY drove his new car—it was a flivver, though they did not call it that in those days—with the meticulous care of one who still distrusts the intentions of the brute and his own skill at circumventing them. As he skidded to a halt in front of the store with brakes set hard a woman came out to the porch and nodded to him. She waited until the noise of the engine had died before she spoke: “Going down to Wagon Wheel, Mac?” “If I can stay with this gasoline bronc that far. Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Stovall?” The woman hesitated, her thin lips pressed tight in an habitual expression of dry irony. She moved closer. “That houn’ Joe Tait has been a-beatin’ up Norma again. She phoned up she wanted to get down to the train. I’ve a fool notion she’s quittin’ him for good.” The cattleman waited in silence. It was not a habit of his to waste words. “Wanted I should find someone to take her and her traps to Wagon Wheel. But seems like everybody’s right busy all of a sudden.” A light sarcasm filtered through the thin, cool voice of the postmistress. “Folks just hate to be onneighbourly, but their team has done gone lame or the wife’s sick or the wagon broke a wheel. O’ course it ain’t that any of them’s afraid to mad that crazy gunman, Tait. Nothin’ like that.” McCoy looked across at the blue-ribbed mountains. Mrs. Stovall noticed that the muscles stood out like ropes on the brown cheeks of his close-gripped jaw. She did not need to ask the reason. Everybody in the Hill Creek country knew the story of Norma Davis and Rowan. “I’m not asking you to take her, Mac,” the woman ran on sharply. “You got more right to have a flat tire than Pete Henderson has to have——” “Where is she?” interrupted the man. “You’ll find her the yon side of the creek.” Mrs. Stovall knew when she had said enough. Silently she watched him crank the car and drive away. As he disappeared at the rim of the park a faint, grim smile of triumph touched her sunken mouth. “I ’most knew he’d take her,” she said aloud to herself. “Course there’ll be a rookus between him and Joe Tait, but I reckon that’s his business.”