Brand Blotters

The eyes of the older man gleamed wrathfully. "As for yo' six bits, if you

offer it to me I'll take it as an insult. At the Bar Double G we're not

doing friendly business with claim jumpers. Don't you evah set yo' legs

under my table again, seh."

Morse shrugged, turned away to the public desk, and addressed an envelope,

the while Lee glared at him from under his heavy beetling brows. Melissy

saw that her father was still of half a mind to throw out the intruder and

she called him to her.

"Dad, José wants you to look at the hoof of one of his wheelers. He asked

if you would come as soon as you could."

Beauchamp still frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand.

"Ce'tainly, honey. Glad to look at it."

"Dad! Please."

The ranchman went out, grumbling. Five minutes later Morse took his seat

on the stage beside the driver, having first left seventy-five cents on

the counter.

The stage had scarce gone when the girl looked up from her bookkeeping to

see the man with the Chihuahua hat.

"Buenos tardes, señorita," he gave her with a flash of white teeth.

"Buenos," she nodded coolly.

But the dancing eyes of her could not deny their pleasure at sight of him.

They had rested upon men as handsome, but upon none who stirred her blood

so much.

He was in the leather chaps of a cowpuncher, gray-shirted, and a polka dot

kerchief circled the brown throat. Life rippled gloriously from every

motion of him. Hermes himself might have envied the perfect grace of the

man.

She supplied his wants while they chatted.

"Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven't you?" she suggested.

"Some. I'll take two bits' worth of that smokin', nina."

She shook her head. "I'm no little girl. Don't you know I'm now half past

eighteen?"

"My--my. That ad didn't do a mite of good, did it?"

"Not a bit."

"And you growing older every day."

"Does my age show?" she wanted to know anxiously.

The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her

dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the

laughter of his surface badinage.

"You're standing it well, honey."

The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress

in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland

flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy,

and, though the girl had never wakened to love, Nature was pushing her

relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but

scantily safeguarded her.