suppose would happen?”
“Why, I suppose I’d give myself away as an ignoramus.”
“Heaven save you for a woolly lambkin! The girl would flee, shrieking, and issue a warning against you as a high-brow, a prig, and a hopeless bore. They don’t read books, except a few chocolate-cream novels. They haven’t the time.”
“But you—”
“Oh, I’m a freak! I get away with it because I’m passably good-looking and know how to dress, and do what I please by the divine right of—well, of just doing it. But, even so, a lot of the men are rather afraid of me in their hearts. They suspect the bluestocking. Let ’em suspect! The market is plenty good enough,” declared Io flippantly.
“Then you just took up books as a sort of freak; a side issue?” The disappointment in his face was almost ludicrous.
“No.” A quiet gravity altered her expression. “I’ll tell you about me, if you want to hear. My mother was the daughter of a famous classical scholar, who was opposed to her marriage because Father has always been a man of affairs. From the first, Mother brought me up to love books and music and pictures. She died when I was twelve, and poor Father, who worshiped her, wanted to carry out her plans for me, though he had no special sympathy with them. To make things worse for him, nobody but Mother ever had any control over me; I was spoiled and self-willed and precocious, and I thought the world owed me a good time. Dad’s business judgment of human nature saved the situation, he thoroughly understood one thing about me, that I’d keep a bargain if I made it. So we fixed up our little contract; I was to go through college and do my best, and after I graduated, I was to have a free hand and an income of my own, a nice one. I did the college trick. I did it well. I was third in my class, and there wasn’t a thing in literature or languages that they could stop me from getting. At eighteen they turned me loose on the world, and here I am, tired of it, but still loving it. That’s all of me. Aren’t I a good little autobiographer. Every lady her own Boswell! What are you listening to?”
“There’s a horse coming along the old trail,” said Banneker.
“Who is it?” she asked. “Some one following us?”
He shook his head. A moment later the figure of a mounted man loomed through the brush. He was young, strong-built, and not ill-looking. “Howdy, Ban,” he said.
Banneker returned the greeting.
“Whee-ew!” shrilled the other, wiping his brow. “This sure does fetch the licker outen a man’s hide. Hell of a wet night at the Sick Coyote last night. Why wasn’t you over?”
“Busy,” replied Banneker.
Something in his tone made the other raise himself from his weary droop. He sighted Io.
“Howdy, ma’am,” he said. “Didn’t see there was ladies present.”
“Good-morning,” said Io.
“Visitin’ hereabouts?” inquired the man, eyeing her curiously.
“Yes.”
“Where, if I might be bold to ask?”
“If you’ve got any questions to ask, ask them of me, Fred,” directed Banneker.
While there was nothing truculent in his manner, it left no doubt as to his readiness and determination.
Fred looked both sullen and crestfallen.
“It ain’t nothin’,” he said. “Only, inquiries was bein’ made by a gent from a Angelica City noospaper last week.”
“Somebody else meant,” asserted Banneker. “You keep that in mind, will you? And it isn’t necessary that you should mention this lady at all. Savvy, Fred?”
The other grunted, touched his sombrero to Io and rode on.
“Has a reporter been here inquiring after me?” asked Io.
“Not after you. It was some one else.”
“If the newspapers tracked me here, I’d have to leave at once.”
“They won’t. At least, it isn’t likely.”
“You’d get me out some way, wouldn’t you, Ban?” she said trustfully.
“Yes.”
“Ban; that Fred person seemed afraid of you.”
“He’s got nothing to be afraid of unless he talks too much.”
“But you had him ‘bluffed.’ I’m sure you had. Ban, did you ever kill a man?”
“No.”
“Or shoot one?”
“Not even that.”
“Yet, I believe, from the way he looked at you, that you’ve got a reputation as a ‘bad man’?”
“So I have. But it’s no fault of mine.”
“How did you get it?”
“You’ll laugh if I tell you. They say I’ve got a ‘killer’s’ eye.”
The girl examined his face with grave consideration. “You’ve got nice eyes,” was her verdict. “That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some girl ought to have it. I used to hear a—a person, who made a deep impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the character of a person with large, soft brown eyes.”
“Isn’t there a flaw in every character?”
“Human nature being imperfect, there must be. What is yours; suppressed murderousness?”
“Not at all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When the smoke cleared away, there was one dead and six others shot up, and Little Brownie was out on the desert, riding for the next place, awfully sore over a hole in his new sombrero. He was a two-gun man from down near the border. Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn’t understand why every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver, told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy’s. Cheap and easy way to get a reputation, isn’t it?”
“But you must have something back of it,” insisted the girl. “Are you a good shot?”
“Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town.”
“Yet you pin some faith to your ‘gun,’ ” she pointed out.
He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Io jumped forward with a startled cry. So swift and secret had been his motion that she hardly saw the weapon before—PLACK—PLACK—PLACK—the three shots had sounded. The smoke drifted around him in a little circle, for the first two shots had been over his shoulder and the third as he whirled. Walking back, he carefully examined the trunks of three trees.
“I’d have only barked that fellow, if he’d been a man,” he observed, shaking his head at the second mark.
“You frightened me,” complained Io.
“I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to see a little gun-play. Out here it isn’t how straight you can shoot at a bull’s-eye, but how quick you can plant your bullets, and usually in a mark that isn’t obliging enough to be dead in line. So I practice occasionally, just in case.”
“Very interesting. But I’ve got luncheon to cook,” said Io.
They returned through the desert. As he opened the door of the shack for her, Banneker, reverting to her autobiographical sketch, remarked thoughtfully and without preliminary:
“I might have known there couldn’t be any one else like you.”