Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/48

 "My dear sweet!" she called it, and then as she found new ideas, she gave it the appellation so familiar down Old Mississip': "This is law! This is law and I administer it!"

Delia looked into the mirror which hung against the cabin wall. She saw her cheeks were a little flattened, and her colour was dulled, but the fire in her eyes was of a different kind than any she had ever seen in them before. It was a cold, grim fire. It seemed to her as though all the lightness and gaiety had departed from her heart for ever more. Yet she was not dissatisfied. Far from it!

Never was she so perfectly certain that she was right, and that she had done well as at this moment when she stood any man's equal in any man's game.

She could not think of resting, of trying to go to sleep. She had too much on her mind to let go in stupid repose and somnolence. She had made the greatest discovery in the world. A man had declared: "Damn you! You've shot me!" and then had turned and fled from her.

Sweeter words no man had ever addressed to a woman, she thought, repeating them over and over again. How silly, how uninteresting, how utterly inconsequential were the countless things other men had addressed to her, compared to that choking compliment by that strange and desperate river man,