“Shall we clear out, then? Shall we let Delaney have possession, and S. Behrman, and all that lot? Shall we give in to them?”
“Never, never,” she exclaimed, her great eyes flashing.
“You wouldn’t like to be turned out of your home, would you, Miss Hilma, because Quien Sabe is your home isn’t it? You’ve lived here ever since you were as big as a minute. You wouldn’t like to have S. Behrman and the rest of ’em turn you out?”
“N‑no,” she murmured. “No, I shouldn’t like that. There’s mamma and—”
“Well, do you think for one second I’m going to let ’em?” cried Annixter, his teeth tightening on his cigar. “You stay right where you are. I’ll take care of you, right enough. Look here,” he demanded abruptly, “you’ve no use for that roaring lush, Delaney, have you?”
“I think he is a wicked man,” she declared. “I know the Railroad has pretended to sell him part of the ranch, and he lets Mr. S. Behrman and Mr. Ruggles just use him.”
“Right. I thought you wouldn’t be keen on him.”
There was a long pause. The buckskin began blowing among the pebbles, nosing for grass, and Annixter shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth.
“Pretty place,” he muttered, looking around him. Then he added: “Miss Hilma, see here, I want to have a kind of talk with you, if you don’t mind. I don’t know just how to say these sort of things, and if I get all balled up as I go along, you just set it down to the fact that I’ve never had any experience in dealing with female girls; understand? You see, ever since the barn dance—yes, and long before then—I’ve been thinking a lot about you. Straight, I have, and I guess you know it. You’re about the only girl that I ever knew well, and I guess,” he declared deliberately, “you’re about the only one I want to know. It’s my nature. You didn’t say anything that time when we stood there together and Delaney was playing the fool, but, somehow, I got the idea that you didn’t want Delaney to do for me one little bit; that if he’d got me then you would have been sorrier than if he’d got anyone else. Well, I felt just that way about you. I would rather have had him shoot any other girl in the room than you; yes, or in the whole State. Why, if anything should happen to you, Miss Hilma—well, I wouldn’t care to go on with anything. S. Behrman could jump Quien Sabe, and welcome. And Delaney could shoot me full of holes whenever he got good and ready. I’d quit. I’d lay right down. I wouldn’t care a whoop about anything any more. You are the only girl for me in the whole world. I didn’t think so at first. I didn’t want to. But seeing you around every day, and seeing how pretty you were, and how clever, and hearing your voice and all, why, it just got all inside of me somehow, and now I can’t think of anything else. I hate to go to San Francisco, or Sacramento, or Visalia, or even Bonneville, for only a day, just because you aren’t there, in any of those places, and I just rush what I’ve got to do so as I can get back here. While you were away that Christmas time, why, I was as lonesome as—oh, you don’t know anything about it. I just scratched off the days on the calendar every night, one by one, till you got back. And it just comes to this, I want you with me all the time. I want you should have a home that’s my home, too. I want to take care of you, and have you all for myself, you understand. What do you say?”
Hilma, standing up before him, retied a knot in her handkerchief bundle with elaborate precaution, blinking at it through her tears.
“What do you say, Miss Hilma?” Annixter repeated. “How about that? What do you say?”
Just above a whisper, Hilma murmured:
“I—I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what? Don’t you think we could hit it off together?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know we could, Hilma. I don’t mean to scare you. What are you crying for?”
“I don’t know.”
Annixter got up, cast away his cigar, and dropping the buckskin’s bridle, came and stood beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. Hilma did not move, and he felt her trembling. She still plucked at the knot of the handkerchief. “I can’t do without you, little girl,” Annixter continued, “and I want you. I want you bad. I don’t get much fun out of life ever. It, sure, isn’t my nature, I guess. I’m a hard man. Everybody is trying to down me, and now I’m up against the Railroad. I’m fighting ’em all, Hilma, night and day, lock, stock, and barrel, and I’m fighting now for my home, my land, everything I have in the world. If I win out, I want somebody to be glad with me. If I don’t—I want somebody to be sorry for me, sorry with me—and that somebody is you. I am dog-tired of going it alone. I want someone to back me up. I want to feel you alongside of me, to give me a touch of the shoulder now and then. I’m tired of fighting for things—land, property, money. I want to fight for some person—somebody beside myself. Understand? I want to feel that it isn’t all selfishness—that there are other interests than mine in the game—that there’s someone dependent on me, and that’s thinking of me as I’m thinking of them—someone I can come home to at night and put my arm around—like this, and have her put her two arms around me—like—” He paused a second, and once again, as it had been in that moment of imminent peril,
