"I trust not."

"You trust not?" she repeated scornfully. "Why?

"Because they would be disobeying orders."

She lowered her gun slightly, but kept her black brows levelled at
him. "I reckon I'm a match for YOU," she said, with a slightly
contemptuous glance at his slight figure, and opened the door. For
a moment they stood looking at each other. He saw, besides the
handsome face and eyes that had charmed him, a tall slim figure,
made broader across the shoulders by an open pea-jacket that showed
a man's red flannel shirt belted at the waist over a blue skirt,
with the collar knotted by a sailor's black handkerchief, and
turned back over a pretty though sunburnt throat. She saw a rather
undersized young fellow in a jaunty undress uniform, scant of gold
braid, and bearing only the single gold shoulder-bars of his rank,
but scrupulously neat and well fitting. Light-colored hair cropped
close, the smallest of light moustaches, clear and penetrating blue
eyes, and a few freckles completed a picture that did not
prepossess her. She was therefore the more inclined to resent the
perfect ease and self-possession with which the stranger carried
off these manifest defects before her.

She laid aside the gun, put her hands deep in the pockets of her
pea-jacket, and, slightly squaring her shoulders, said curtly,
"What do you want?"

"A very little information, which I trust it will not trouble you
to give me. My men have just discovered the uniform belonging to a