"I came over to pay my party call," he explained.

"It really wasn't necessary. A run in the machine is not a formal
function."

"Maybe not in Kalamazoo."

"I thought perhaps you had come to get my purse and the
sixty-three dollars," she derided.

"No, ma'am; nor yet to get that bunch of cows I was going to
rustle from you to buy an auto. I came to ask you to go riding
with me."

The audacity of it took her breath. Of all the outrageous things
she had ever heard, this was the cream. An acknowledged outlaw,
engaged in feud with her retainers over that deadly question of
the run of the range, he had sauntered over to the ranch where
lived a dozen of his enemies, three of them still scarred with
his bullets, merely to ask her to go riding with him. The
magnificence of his bravado almost obliterated its impudence. Of
course she would not think of going. The idea! But her eyes
glowed with appreciation of his courage, not the less because the
consciousness of it was so conspicuously absent from his manner.

"I think not, Mr. Bannister" and her face almost imperceptibly
stiffened. "I don't go riding with strangers, nor with men who
shoot my boys. And I'll give you a piece of advice, sir. That is,
to burn the wind back to your home. Otherwise I won't answer for