"Me? Why, child, I'm so busy absorbing _kultur_ from your scientific manager that my spare moments for damsels in distress are none too plenty. You sent out nary a call, and how expect the lowest of your serfs to hang around?"
"Serf? That's good!" she said skeptically. "And say, you must love Conrad about as much as Cap Pike does."
"Don't know that rattlesnake would be my first choice of comparison," remarked Rhodes. "Back in Tennessee we have a variety beside which the rattlesnake is a gentleman; a rattlesnake does his best to give warning of intention, but the copperhead never does."
"Copperhead! that's funny, for you know Conrad's hair is just about the color of copper, dusty copper, faded copper--copper with tin filings sifted through."
"Don't strain yourself," laughed Rhodes. "That beautiful blondness makes him mighty attractive to our Mexican cousins."
"They can have my share," decided the girl. "I could worry along without him quite awhile. He manages to get rid of all the likeable range men _muy pronto_."
Rhodes laughed until she stared at him frowningly, and then the delicious color swept over her face.
"Oh, _you_!" she said, and Rhodes thought of sweet peas, and pink roses in old southern gardens as her lips strove to be straight, yet curved deliciously. No one had mentioned to him how pretty she was; he had thought of her as a browned tom-boy, but instead she was a shell-pink bud on a slender stem, and wonder of wonders--she rode a side-saddle in Arizona!
"Are you going to laugh at that, too?" she demanded.
"Why no, it hadn't occurred to me. It sort of looks like home to me--our southern girls use them."
She turned to him with a quick birdlike movement, her gray eyes softened and trusting.
"It was my mother's saddle, a wedding present from the vaqueros of our ranches when she married my father. I am only beginning to use it, and not so sure of myself as with the one I learned on."
"Oh, I don't know," he observed. "You certainly looked sure when you jumped that fence at Herrara's."
She glanced at him quickly, curious, and then smiling.
"And it was you, not the meadow lark! You are too clever!"
"And you didn't answer, just turned your back on the lonely ranger," he stated dolefully, but she laughed.