"No. I'll listen, if you will tell me."
Weaver shook his head. "No--I guess that wouldn't be playing fair. You're on the other side of the fence. That's where you belong. Come to that, I'm no white-winged angel, anyhow. All that's said of me--most of it, at least--I sure enough deserve."
"I wonder," she mused, smiling at him.
Scarcely a week before, she had been so immature that even callow Tom Dixon had seemed experienced beside her. Now she was a young woman in bloom, instinctively sure of herself, even without experience to guide her. Though he had never said so, she knew quite well that this berserk of the plains had begun to love her with all the strength of his untamed heart. She would have been less than human had it not pleased her, even though, at the same time, it terrified her.
Buck swept his hand around the horizon. "Ask anybody. They'll all give me the same certificate of character. And I reckon they ain't so far out, either," he added grimly.
"Perhaps they are all right, and yet all wrong too."
He looked at her in surprise. "What do you mean?"
"Maybe they don't see the other side of you" said Phyllis gently.
"How do you know there's another side?"
"I don't know how, but I do."
"I reckon it must be a right puny one."
"It has a good deal to fight against, hasn't it?"
"You're right it has. There's a devil in me that gets up on its hind legs and strangles what little good it finds. But it certainly beats me how you know so much that goes on inside a sweep like me."
"You forget. I'm not very good myself. You know my temper runs away with me, too."
"You blessed lamb!" she heard him say under his breath; and the way he said it made the exclamation half a groan.
For her naive confession emphasized the gulf between them. Yet it pleased him mightily that she linked herself with him as a fellow wrongdoer.
"I suppose you've been wondering why your people have made no attempt to rescue you," he said presently; for he saw her eyes were turned toward the hills beyond which lay her home.
"I'm glad they haven't, because it must have made trouble; but I am surprised," she confessed.
"They have tried it--twice," he told her. "First time was Saturday morning, just before daylight. We trapped them as they were coming through the Box Cañon. I knew they would come down that way, because it was the nearest; so I was ready for them."
"And what happened?" Her dilated eyes were like those of a stricken doe.