The Fighting Shepherdess

"But I promised!" she cried, impatiently. "And you've told me I must always keep my promise, 'if it takes the hide'!"

"You exceeded your authority," he reiterated. "You've no right to promise what doesn't belong to you."

"Then it's all 'talk' about our being partners," she said, sneeringly. "You don't mean a word of it."

"You shan't make a fool of yourself, Katie, if I can help it," he retorted.

"Because you don't care for friends, you don't want me to have any!" she flung at him hotly.

He was silent a long time, thinking, while she waited angrily, then he responded quietly and with obvious effort: "That's where you're mistaken, Katie. If I have one regret it is that in the past I have not more deliberately cultivated the friendship of true men and gentle women when I have had the opportunity. It doesn't make much difference whether they are brilliant or rich or successful, if only they are true-hearted. Loyalty is the great attribute--but," and he shrugged a shoulder, "it is my judgment that you will not find it in that quarter."

"You're prejudiced."

"It is my privilege to have an opinion," he replied coldly.

"We were going to be friends--Mrs. Toomey and I--we shook hands on it!" Tears of angry disappointment were close to the surface.

He replied, doggedly: "If you have to buy your friendships, Katie, you'd better keep your money."

The speech stung her. She glared at him across the narrow table, and, in the moment, each had a sense of unreality. The quarrel was like a bolt from the blue, as startling and unexpected--as most quarrels are--the bitterest and most lasting. Then she sprang to her feet and hurled a taunt at him some Imp of Darkness must have suggested: "You're jealous!" She stamped a foot at him. "That's the real reason. You're jealous of everybody that would be friends with me! You're jealous of Hughie. You didn't like his coming here and you don't like his writing to me! I hate you--I won't stay any longer!" It was the blood of Jezebel of the Sand Coulee talking, and there was the look of her mother on the girl's face, in her reckless, uncontrolled fury.

Mormon Joe winced, exactly as though she had struck him. He sat quite still while the color faded, leaving his face bloodless. Kate never had known anything like the white rage it depicted. Persons at the Sand Coulee who lost their temper cursed volubly and loudly, and threatened or made bodily attacks upon the cause of it. In spite of herself she shrank a little as he, too, got up slowly and faced her. She didn't know him at all--this man who first threw his cigarette away carefully, as though he were in a drawing room and must regard the ashes--he was a personality from an environment with which she was unfamiliar. Then, as though she were his equal in years, experience and intelligence, he spoke to her in a tone that was cool and impersonal, yet which went slash! slash! slash! like the fine, deep, quick cut of a razor.