"Any woman, dealing with men like you, has need of a gun!"
"I'll tell you this," he muttered. "I'm a fair judge of men, if not of women. And when it's a case of a man ... why just show me a man who carries a pocket-gun and I'll show you a cheap ragamuffin, a tin horn, or an overgrown kid ... or a dirty coward. A man's weapon is a rifle carried in the open; give me a good pair of boots and I'll stamp the white livers out of a whole crowd of your little gunmen.... As for women, gun-toting women...." He broke off with a heavy shrug. "Now, girl, I'm hungry. The smell of your coffee has been in my nostrils a long time. See what you can give me to eat."
"So I am to wait on you ... to be your servant...."
"To be my slave!" he shouted at her. "Proud, are you? So much the better. I swore to make you pay, and you begin paying now. Yes, as my slave as long as I like!"
"I call myself the best man that ever came into this wilderness country," he told her impudently. "If you are in doubt, bring on any other man of your choice and ask him, with your pretty smiles, if he cares to stand up against me! Yes, a man who goes rough-shod over everything and anything and anybody who stands in his way...."
"I am no boaster and in your heart you know it!... There's another damn-fool convention for you, that business of great modesty! A man who is sure of himself doesn't have to walk easy and talk easy, but can tell other men what he is, and then, by glory, show 'em!"
Still she was scornful of him ... though she could not keep out of her thought that picture which he had made when, axe in hand, he had laid an armed jailer in the dust, and single-handed had made a jail delivery which hundreds of other men wanted to make and held back from ... through lack of that unrestricted confidence which was Bruce Standing's.
"You, too ... for a woman ... have courage," he muttered. And then, with a sudden arm flung out: "I'm hungry, I tell you."
"It's easy to die ... for any one who is not a coward. And I just told you that you had courage." He came suddenly close to her. "But there are other things that are not so easy! What if I put my two arms about you? If I hold you tight ... and set my lips to yours ... and...."