His voice was steady and deep with the ease
and assurance that she liked in him. She had marked to-day in his
earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost
indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.
"How am I to know whether it would be presuming?" she asked.
"But I was going to say--"
"When rudely interrupted!" She was trying to make it easy for him to say
whatever he wished.
"--that these troubles of mine are really personal. I have committed no
crime and am not fleeing from justice."
She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road
near the park limits.
"How uninteresting! We expect a Montana ranchman to have a spectacular
past."
"But not to carry it, I hope, to Washington. On the range I might become
a lawless bandit in the interest of picturesqueness; but here--"
"Here in the world of frock-coated statesmen nothing really interesting
is to be expected."
She walked her horse again. It occurred to her that he might wish an
assurance of silence from her. What she had seen would make a capital bit
of gossip, to say nothing of being material for the newspapers, and her
conscience, as she reflected, grew uneasy at the thought of shielding
him.
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