instant he grasped it firmly, and rose to his feet, dragging to his own
level as he did so, the struggling figure of a young girl.

"Leave me go!" she said, more ashamed than frightened.

Lance looked at her. She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and
lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and
bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles, like
grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray,
presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,--at least they
were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered
allspice. 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