CHAPTER XVI.
BLUFF He found no dance in progress, however, but in the otherwise empty eating place, which Sally owned and ran with her two capable hands and the assistance of a cook, sat Sally herself dining at the same table with the tenderfoot, the flirt, the horse-breaker, the tamer of gun-fighters.
Nash stood in the shadow of the doorway watching that lean, handsome face with the suggestion of mockery in the eyes and the trace of sternness around the thin lips.

Not a formidable figure by any means, but since his experiences of the past few days, Nash was grown extremely thoughtful.
What he finally thought he caught in this most unusual tenderfoot was a certain alertness of a more or less hair-trigger variety.

Even now as he sat at ease at the table, one elbow resting lightly upon it, apparently enwrapped in the converse of Sally Fortune, Nash had a consciousness that the other might be on his feet and in the most distant part of the room within a second.
What he noted in the second instant of his observation was that Sally was not at all loath to waste her time on the stranger.

She was eating with a truly formidable conventionality of manner, and a certain grace with which she raised the ponderous coffee cup, made of crockery guaranteed to resist all falls, struck awe through the heart of the cowpuncher.

She was bent on another conquest, beyond all doubt, and that she would not make it never entered the thoughts of Nash.