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“Of course it is. And it’s the only really nice evening frock I’ve got.”

“I’ll buy you another.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. I wouldn’t accept one from you.”

He glared at her darkly.

“Think yourself a cut above me, I suppose.”

“I certainly do at the moment. If you’d cared two pins for Mr. Holmes, you’d have thought of him first, and not of your own silly pride.”

“It wasn’t pride. It was what he said about…” He stopped suddenly.

Ann, with a flash of intuition, knew that Hicky’s remark had been some reference to herself, but that this young man was not going to give her the satisfaction of knowing why the battle had been fought.

Looked at from this angle, the affair assumed a slightly different aspect. Ann’s anger against him cooled.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Hurt?” he echoed roughly. “It’d take more than that to hurt me. And let me tell you you’ve done a damn silly thing. We should have fought it out to a finish.”

“What sort of a finish?” she asked scornfully. “Until one of you had killed the other?”

“Better that than stopping in the middle of a fight.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “If you want to kill each other, at least have the decency to wait until the shearing’s finished. You say Mr. Holmes is a white man. Well, behave like a white man yourself. Promise me you’ll wait to settle your difference with Hicky until after the shearing is finished, will you?”