"No; I ain't such a bloomin' idiot as I look."
"I don't know 'bout that," answered the young woman coolly.
"Now, look here, Idy," he said; "you'd ought to quit foolin'. You know what I mean well enough; you're just purtendin'. You know I want to marry ye."
"Me!" The girl lifted her brows until they disappeared under the edge of her much-becurled bang. "Want to marry _me!_ Great Scott!"
"I don't see why it's great Scott or great anything else," said Parker doggedly.
Idy held the reins in her left hand, and smoothed her alpaca lap with the whip handle, in maiden meditation.
"Well, I don't know as 't is so very great after all," she said, rubbing the folds of her dress, and glancing at him in giggling confusion.
Parker made an experimental motion with his right arm toward the back of the seat. The girl repelled him dexterously with her elbow.
"You drop that, Parker Lowe!" she said, with dignity. "I ain't so far gone as all that. There's that Gonsallies felluh lookin' at us. You just straighten up, or I'll hit ye a cut with this whip!"
Her lover gave a short, embarrassed laugh.
"Oh, come now, Idy; Ricardo don't understand United States."
"Well, I don't care whether he understands United States or not. I guess idiots acts about the same in all languages. I'll bet a dollar he understands what you're up to, anyway; so there."
She drove on, in rigid perpendicularity, past the adobe ranch-house of the Gonzales family, and around the curve of the lake-shore, into the sunshine of the wild mustard that fringed the road. Through it they could see the pale sheen of the ripening barley-fields, broken here and there by the darker green of alfalfa.
As the mustard grew taller and denser, Idy's spine relaxed sufficiently to permit a covert, conciliatory glance toward her companion's arm, which hung from the back of the seat in the disappointed attitude it had assumed at her repulse.
"I s'pose you think I'm awful touchy," she broke out at last, "an' mebbe I am; but before I promise to marry anybody, there's two things he's got to promise _me_--he's got to sign the pledge, an' he's got to get even with that felluh Barden."
Parker's face, which had brightened perceptibly at the first requirement, clouded dismally at the second.