The Best Western Novels of William MacLeod Raine. William MacLeod Raine

Until the sheriff can make other arrangements."

      "You have no right to do it without notifying my father. He is at Noches with my brother."

      "Mr. Weaver will do as he thinks best about that." The spinster shut her lips tight and walked from the room.

      Supper was brought to Phyllis by the Mexican woman. In spite of her indignation she ate and slept well. Nor did her appetite appear impaired next morning, when she breakfasted in her bedroom. Noon found her promoted to the family dining room. Weaver carried his arm in a sling, but made no reference to the fact. He attempted conversation, but Phyllis withdrew into herself and had nothing more friendly than a plain "No" or "Yes" for him. His sister was presently called away to arrange some household difficulty. At once Phyllis attacked the big man lounging in his chair at his ease.

      "I want to go home. I've got to be at the schoolhouse to-morrow morning," she announced.

      "It won't hurt you any to miss a few days' schooling, my dear. You'll learn more here than you will there, anyhow," he assured her pleasantly. Buck was cracking two walnuts in the palm of his hand and let his lazy smile drift her way only casually.

      She stamped her foot. "I tell you I'm the teacher. It is necessary I should be there."

      "You a schoolmarm!" he repeated, in surprise. "How old are you?"

      Her dress was scarcely below her shoe tops. She still had the slimness of immature girlhood, the adorable shy daring of some uncaptured wood nymph.

      "Does that matter to you, sir?"

      "How old?" he reiterated.

      "Going-on-eighteen," she answered—not because she wanted to, but because somehow she must. There was something compelling about this man's will. She would have resisted it had she not wanted to gain her point about going home.

      "So you teach the kids their A B C's, do you? And you just out of them yourself! How many scholars have you?"

      "Fourteen."

      "And they all love teacher, of course. Would you take me for a scholar, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"

      "No!" she flamed.

      "You'd find me right teachable. And I would promise to love you, too."

      Color came and went in her face beneath the brow. How dared he mock her so! It humiliated and embarrassed and angered her.

      "Are you going to let me go back to my school?" she demanded.

      "I reckon your school will have to get along without you for a few days. Your fourteen scholars will keep right on loving you, I expect. 'To memory dear, though far from eye.' Or, if you like, I'll send my boys up into the hills, and round up the whole fourteen here for you. Then school can keep right here in the house. How about that? Ain't that a good notion, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"

      She could stand his ironic mockery no longer. She faced him, fearless as a tiger: "You villain!"

      With that, turning on her heel, she passed swiftly into her little bedroom, and slammed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.

      "She's sure got some devil in her," he laughed appreciatively, and he cracked another walnut.

      Already he had struck the steel of her quality. She would be his prisoner because she must, but the "no compromise" flag was nailed to her masthead.

      "I wonder why you are so fond of me?" he mused aloud next day when he found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.

      He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full length at supple ease. Leaning on an elbow, he had been watching her for some time.

      Her gaze was on the distant line of hills; on her face that far-away expression which told him that he was not on the map for her. Used as he was to impressing himself upon the imagination of women, this stung his vanity sharply. He liked better the times when her passion flamed out at him.

      Now he lost his sardonic mockery in a flash of anger.

      "Do you hear me? I asked you a question."

      She brought her head round until her eyes rested upon him.

      "Will you ask it again, please? I wasn't listening."

      "I want to know what makes you hate me so," he demanded roughly.

      "Do I hate you?"

      He laughed irritably. "What else do you call it? You won't hardly eat at the same table with me. Last night you wouldn't come down to supper. Same way this morning. If I sit down near you, soon you find an excuse to leave. When I speak, you don't answer."

      "You are my jailer, not my friend."

      "I might be both."

      "No, thank you!"

      She said it with such quick, instinctive certainty that he ground his teeth in resentment. He was the kind of man that always wanted what he could not get. He began to covet this girl mightily, even while he told himself that he was a fool for his pains. What was she but an untaught, country schoolgirl? It would be a strange irony of fate if Buck Weaver should fall in love with a sheepman's daughter.

      "Many people would go far to get my friendship," he told her.

      Quietly she looked at him. "The friends of my people are my friends. Their enemies are mine."

      "Yet you said you didn't hate me."

      "I thought I did, but I find I don't."

      "Not worth hating, I suppose?"

      She neither corrected nor rejected his explanation.

      He touched his wounded arm as he went on: "If you don't hate me, why this compliment to me? I reckon good, genuine hate sent that bullet."

      The girl colored, but after a moment's hesitation answered:

      "Once I shot a coyote when I saw it making ready to pounce on one of our lambs. I did not hate that coyote."

      "Thank you," he told her ironically.

      Her gaze went back to the mountains. She had always had a capacity for silence. But it was as extraordinary to her as to him how, in the past few days, she had sloughed the shy timidity of a mountain girl and found the enduring courage of womanhood. Her wits, too, had taken on the edge of maturity. He found that her tongue could strike swiftly and sharply. She was learning to defend herself in all the ways women have acquired by inheritance.

      Weaver's jaw set like a vise. Getting to his feet, he looked down at her with the hard, relentless eyes that had made his name a terror.

      "Good enough, Miss Phyllis Sanderson. You've chosen your way. I'll choose mine. You've got to learn that I'm master here; and, by God, I'll teach it to you. Before I get through with you, young woman, you'll come running when I snap my fingers. From to-day things will be different. You'll eat your meals with us and not in your room. You'll speak when you're spoken to. Set yourself up against me, and I'll bring you to your knees fast enough. There's no law on the Twin Star Ranch but Buck Weaver's will."

      He strode away, almost herculean in figure, and every inch of him forceful. She had never seen such a man, one so virile and, at the same time, so wilful and so masterful. Before he was out of her sight, she got an instance of his recklessness.

      A Mexican vaquero was driving some horses into a corral. His master strode up to him, and dragged him from the saddle.

      "Didn't I tell you to take the colts down to the long pasture?"

      "Si, señor," answered the trembling native.

      Weaver's great fist rose and fell once. The Mexican sank limply down. Without another glance at him, the cattleman flung him aside, and strode to the house.

      As the owner of the Twin Star had said, so it was. Thereafter Phyllis sat at the table with him and his sister, while Josephine, the Mexican woman, waited upon them. The girl came and went at his bidding. But she held herself with such a quiet aloofness that his