"You--SHOT me!" And she sobbed again.
Before he answered, he drew backward a step or two, sat down upon the edge of a rock which had rolled out from a stone-heap, and pulled her down beside him, still holding her fast, as if he half believed her capable of soaring away over the treetops, after all.
"I guess I didn't murder you--from the chase you gave me.

Did I hit you at all ?" "Yes, you did! You nearly broke my arm--and you might have killed me, you big brute! Look what you did--and I never harmed you at all!" She pushed up a sleeve, and held out her arm accusingly in the moonlight, disclosing a tiny, red furrow where the skin was broken and still bleeding.

"And you shot a big hole right through Aunt Phoebe's sheet!" she added, with tearful severity.
He caught her arm, bent his head over it--and for a moment he was perilously near to kissing it; an impulse which astonished him considerably, and angered him more.

He dropped the arm rather precipitately; and she lifted it again, and regarded the wound with mournful interest.
"I'd like to know what right you have to prowl around shooting at people," she scolded, seeing how close she could come to touching the place with her fingertips without producing any but a pleasurable pain.
"Just as much right as you have to get up in the middle of the night and go ahowling all over the ranch wrapped up in a sheet," he retorted ungallantly.
"Well, if I want to do it, I don't see why you need concern yourself about it.

I wasn't doing it for your benefit, anyway." "Will you tell me what you DID do it for?
Of all the silly tomfoolery--" An impish smile quite obliterated the Christmas-angel look for an instant, then vanished, and left her a pretty, abused maiden who is grieved at harsh treatment.
"Well, I wanted to scare Gene," she confessed.