"It's to keep other people from knowing you.

You're hidin' agin." "I am," returned Lance; "but," he interrupted, "it's only the same old thing." "But you wrote from Monterey that it was all over," she persisted.
"So it would have been," he said gloomily, "but for some dog down here who is hunting up an old scent.

I'll spot him yet, and"-- He stopped suddenly, with such utter abstraction of hatred in his fixed and glittering eyes that she almost feared him.

She laid her hand quite unconsciously on his arm.

He grasped it; his face changed.
"I couldn't wait any longer to see you, Flip, so I came here anyway," he went on.