"May I smoke?" asked Morena. He was still smiling his charming smile
and watching her out of the corners of his eyes.
"I'm not hinderin' you any," said she.
Morena smiled deeper. He took some time making and lighting his
cigarette.
"You don't smoke, yourself?" he asked.
"No."
"Nor dance?"
"No."
"Nor behave prettily to polite young men?"
Again the woman looked at him. "You ain't so awful young, are you?"
He laughed aloud.
"I amuse you, don't I? Well, I'm not always so all-fired funny,"
drawled the creature, lowering her head a little.
"No. I've heard that you're not. You rather run things here, I gather;
got the boys 'plumb-scared'?"
"Did Mr. Yarnall tell you that?"
"Yes. I've just in the last few minutes remembered who you are. You're
Jane. You cook for the 'outfit,' and Yarnall was telling us the other
night how he sent one of the boys out for a cook, the last one, a man,
having been beaten up, and how the boy had brought you back behind him
on his saddle. He said you'd kept order for him ever since, were
better than a foreman. Who was the man you threw out to-night?"
"Perhaps," drawled Jane, "he was just a feller who asked too many
questions?"
Again Morena's smile deepened into his cheeks. He gave way, in the
Jewish fashion so deceptively suggestive of meekness and timidity,
when it is, at its worst, merely pliable insolence, at its best,
pliable determination. "You must pardon me, Miss Jane," he said in his
murmuring, cultivated voice. "You see I've had a great misfortune.
I've never been in your West. I've lived in New York where good
manners haven't time or space to flourish. I hadn't the least
intention of being impertinent. Do you want me to go?"
He moved as if to leave her, and she did not lift a finger to detain
him.
"I'm not carin'. Do as you please," she said with entire indifference.
"Oh," said Morena, looking back at her, "I don't stay where people are
'not carin'.'"
She gave him an extraordinarily intelligent look. "I should say that's
the only place you'd be wantin' to stay in at all--where you're not
exactly urged to come," she said.
Morena flushed and his lids flickered. He was for an instant absurdly
inclined to anger and made two or three steps away. But he came back.