it, and she knew he would. For he was no puling schoolboy, but a man,
game to the core.

The face of another man rose before her, saturnine and engaging and
debonair. With the picture came wave on wave of shame. He was a detected
villain, and she had let him kiss her. But beneath the self-scorn was
something new, something that stung her blood, that left her flushed and
tingling with her first experience of sex relations.

A week ago she had not yet emerged fully from the chrysalis of
childhood. But in the Southland flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals
hard upon the heels of infancy. Nature was pushing her relentlessly
toward a womanhood for which her splendid vitality and unschooled
impulses but scantily safeguarded her. The lank, shy innocence of the
fawn still wrapped her, but in the heart of this frank daughter of the
desert had been born a poignant shyness, a vague, delightful trembling
that marked a change. A quality which had lain banked in her nature like
a fire since childhood now threw forth its first flame of heat. At
sunset she had been still treading the primrose path of youth; at
sunrise she had entered upon the world-old heritage of her sex.




CHAPTER VII

A SHOT FROM AMBUSH


From the valley there drifted up a breeze-swept sound. The rider on the