Daughter of the Dons

The man's gaze shifted. "You'd have to live here a right long time, I reckon."

A quick slant of her gay eyes reproached him. "You don't have to be so gallant, Mr. Gordon. The State pays me fifteen hundred dollars a year to wait on you, anyhow."

"You don't say. As much as that? My, we're liable to go bankrupt in New Mexico, ain't we? And, if you want to know, I don't say nice things to you because I have to, but because I want to."

She laughed with a pretense at incredulity. "In another day or two I'll find out just what special favor I'm able to do Mr. Gordon. The regular thing is to bring flowers or candy, you know. Generally they say, too, that there never has been a clerk holding this job as fit for it as I am."

"You're some clerk, all right. Say, where can I find the original of this Agua Caliente grant, Miss Kate?"

She smiled to herself as she went to get him a certified copy. "Only two days, and he's using my first name. Inside of a week he'll be calling me 'Dearie,'" she thought. But she knew very well there was no danger. This young fellow was the kind of man that could be informal without the slightest idea of flirting or making love.

Kate Underwood's interest in the fight between the claimants for the Valdés and Moreño grants was not based entirely upon her liking for Dick. He learned this the fourth day of his stay in Santa Fé.

"Do you know that you were followed to the hotel last night, Mr. Gordon?" she asked him, as soon as he arrived at the State House.

His eyes met hers instantly. "Was I? How do you know?"

"I left the building just after you did. Two Mexicans followed you. I don't know when I first suspected it, but I trailed along to make sure. There can be no doubt about it."

"Not a bit of doubt. Found it out the first day when I left the hotel," he told her cheerfully.

"You knew it all the time," she cried, amazed.

"That doesn't prevent me from being properly grateful to you for your kindness," he hastened to say.

"What are they following you for?" she wanted to know.

Dick told her something of his experiences in the Rio Chama Valley without mentioning that part of them which had to do with Miss Valdés. At the sound of Manuel Pesquiera's name the eyes of the girl flashed. Dick had already noticed that his name was always to her a signal for repression of some emotion. The eyes contracted and hardened the least in the world. Some men would not have noticed this, but more than once Gordon's life had hung upon the right reading of such signs.