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“Go after your horse at once! At once, do you hear me?” she commanded.

Then to the Maoris:

“Back to your camp, all of you. Here’s the boss coming now across the paddock. He’ll fetch the police! Quick! Before there’s trouble.”

They obeyed her. Hicky obeyed her. Why, she never stopped to think. Perhaps the amazing spectacle of this slip of a girl in her white evening frock standing unafraid, and passionately angry, before them all was a trifle unnerving. The crowd dispersed, and she was left alone with Rodney Marsh.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she asked indignantly. “Didn’t you say things hadn’t been too easy for Mr. Holmes lately? And now you deliberately make more trouble for him.”

Marsh’s attack had been anything but deliberate, but she didn’t stop to think of that, she was too incensed.

“Only this morning he was saying he hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to let your private quarrels interfere with his work at shearing time, and now you’ve done it.”

“You don’t know what that… that brute said.”

Marsh was mopping his battered face with a red-stained handkerchief. Ann suddenly had a vision of a small boy being lectured by a school ma’am, and she would have been moved to laughter if she hadn’t felt so thoroughly infuriated.

“A silly boy! That’s all you are!” she said.

“Look here,” he began fiercely, and then his eyes fell on the blood-stains on her frock. “Your dress is ruined,” he ended lamely.