Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny deer-skin color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun.

She had evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.
Lance let his grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then with a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back to her.
She did not retreat, but continued looking at him in a half-surly embarrassment.
"I ain't a bit frightened," she said; "I'm not going to run away,--don't you fear." "Glad to hear it," said Lance, with unmistakable satisfaction, "but why did you go for my revolver ?" She flushed again and was silent.

Presently she began to kick the earth at the roots of the tree, and said, as if confidentially to her foot: "I wanted to get hold of it before you did." "You did ?--and why ?" "Oh, you know why." Every tooth in Lance's head showed that he did, perfectly.

But he was discreetly silent.
"I didn't know what you were hiding there for," she went on, still addressing the tree, "and," looking at him sideways under her white lashes, "I didn't see your face." This subtle compliment was the first suggestion of her artful sex.

It actually sent the blood into the careless rascal's face, and for a moment confused him.