“The Doge!” Jack exclaimed, brightening.

Jim was taken unawares.  Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?

“Not the Doge of Venice—­hardly, when Mr. Ewold’s love runs to Florence!  The Doge of Little Rivers!”

“Why, the Doge—­of course!” Jim was “on” now and grinning.  “I didn’t think of my history at first.  That’s a good one for Jasper Ewold!”

“O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!” said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper’s abundance filled the doorway.  “But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk.”

“Doge, eh?” Jasper tasted the word.  “Pooh!” he said.  “Persiflage! persiflage!  I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it.”

“And Miss Ewold?  How is she?” Jack asked.  Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel.

His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say.  Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed.  He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening.

“She’s not a bit the worse.  Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this afternoon as usual!  I’ve had the whole story, from the pass till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg.  She recognizes the great kindness you did her.”

“Not a kindness—­an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,” Jack put in.

“Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl’s self-reliance.  When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately.”

“Oh, I am glad of that!” Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre.  “I had worried.  I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on.  But I had to.  And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness—­so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression.”

“Ah, Mary has courage and humor.  She sees the ridiculous.  She laughs at it all, now!”

“Laughs?” asked Jack.  “Yes, it was laughable;” and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.

Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller’s life as in Mary’s.

“Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir,” Jasper proceeded.  “You may have had to postpone an important engagement.  I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning.”

“When one has been in the desert for a long time,” Jack answered, “a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure.  In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go.  Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed.”