Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/308

THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX sat up, looking about him bewilderedly. His glance rested on the girl, and he sprang to his feet and faced her.

Annie-Many-Ponies smiled her little, tantalizing, wistfully inviting smile—the smile which Luck had whimsically called heart-twisting. "I awful lonesome," she murmured, and sat down with her back nestling comfortably against a grassy bank. "You talk. I not lets you sleep all time. You think I not good for talk to?"

"Me, I not tell w'at I'm theenk," Luis retorted with a crooning note, and sat down facing her. "Ramon be mad me."

Annie-Many-Ponies looked at him, her eyes soft and heavy with that languorous look which will quickest befuddle the sense of a man. "You tell; Ramon not hear," she hinted. "Ramon, he got plenty trobles for thinking about." She smiled again. "Ramon plenty long ways off. He got Bill Holmes for talking to. You talk to me."

How he did it, why he did it, Luis Rojas could never explain afterwards. Something there was in her, smile, in her voice, that bewitched him. 296