For it was really a dagger! jeweled-handled and richly wrought—­such as Lanty had never looked upon before.  The hilt was studded with gems, and the blade, which had a cutting edge, was damascened in blue and gold.  Her soft eyes reflected the brilliant setting, her lips parted breathlessly; then, as her mother’s voice arose in the other room, she thrust it back into its velvet sheath and clapped it into her pocket.  Its rare beauty had confirmed her resolution of absolute secrecy.  To have shown it now would have made “no end of talk.”  And she was not sure but that her parents would have demanded its custody!  And it was given to her by him to keep.  This settled the question of moral ethics.  She took the first opportunity to run up to her bedroom and hide it under the mattress.

Yet the thought of it filled the rest of her evening.  When her household duties were done she took up her novel again, partly from force of habit and partly as an attitude in which she could think of it undisturbed.  For what was fiction to her now?  True, it possessed a certain reminiscent value.  A “dagger” had appeared in several romances she had devoured, but she never had a clear idea of one before.  “The Count sprang back, and, drawing from his belt a richly jeweled dagger, hissed between his teeth,” or, more to the purpose:  “‘Take this,’ said Orlando, handing her the ruby-hilted poignard which had gleamed upon his thigh, ‘and should the caitiff attempt thy unguarded innocence—­’”

“Did ye hear what your father was sayin’?” Lanty started.  It was her mother’s voice in the doorway, and she had been vaguely conscious of another voice pitched in the same querulous key, which, indeed, was the dominant expression of the small ranchers of that fertile neighborhood.  Possibly a too complaisant and unaggressive Nature had spoiled them.

“Yes!—­no!” said Lanty abstractedly, “what did he say?”

“If you wasn’t taken up with that fool book,” said Mrs. Foster, glancing at her daughter’s slightly conscious color, “ye’d know!  He allowed ye’d better not leave yer filly in the far pasture nights.  That gang o’ Mexican horse-thieves is out again, and raided McKinnon’s stock last night.”

This touched Lanty closely.  The filly was her own property, and she was breaking it for her own riding.  But her distrust of her parents’ interference was greater than any fear of horse-stealers.  “She’s mighty uneasy in the barn; and,” she added, with a proud consciousness of that beautiful yet carnal weapon upstairs, “I reckon I ken protect her and myself agin any Mexican horse-thieves.”

“My! but we’re gettin’ high and mighty,” responded Mrs. Foster, with deep irony.  “Did you git all that outer your fool book?”

“Mebbe,” said Lanty curtly.