Trailin'!

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CRITICISM

  After the first burst of speed, Bard resigned himself to followingSally, knowing that he could never catch her, first because her horsecarried a burden so much lighter than his own, but above all because thegirl seemed to know every rock and twist in the trail, and rode ascourageously through the night as if it had been broad day.

  She was following a course as straight as a crow's flight between theranch of Drew and his old place, a desperate trail that veered andtwisted up the side of the mountain and then lurched headlong down onthe farther side of the crest. Half a dozen times Anthony checked hishorse and shook his head at the trail, but always the figure of thegirl, glimmering through the dusk ahead, challenged and drove him on.

  Out of the sharp descent of the downward trail they broke suddenly ontothe comparatively smooth floor of the valley, and he followed her at agallop which ended in front of the old house of Drew. They had been farless than five hours on the way, yet his long detour to the south hadgiven him three days of hard riding to cover the same points. His desireto meet Logan again became almost a passion. He swung to the ground, andadvanced to Sally with his hands outstretched.

  "You've shown me the short cut, all right," he said, "and I thank you athousand times, Sally. So-long, and good luck to you."

  She disregarded his extended hand.

  "Want me to leave you here, Bard?"

  "You certainly can't stay."

  She slipped from her horse and jerked the reins over its head. Inanother moment she had untied the cinch and drawn off the saddle. Sheheld its weight easily on one forearm. Actions, after all, are moreeloquent than words.

  "I suppose," he said gloomily, "that if I'd asked you to stay you'd haveridden off at once?"

  She did not answer for a moment, and he strained his eyes to read herexpression through the dark. At length she laughed with a new note inher voice that drew her strangely close to him. During the long ride hehad come to feel toward her as toward another man, as strong as himself,almost, as fine a horseman, and much surer of herself on that wildtrail; but now the laughter in an instant rubbed all this away. It wasrather low, and with a throaty quality of richness. The pulse of thesound was like a light finger tapping some marvellously sensitive chordwithin him.

  "D'you think that?" she said, and went directly through the door of thehouse.

  He heard the crazy floor creak beneath her weight; the saddle droppedwith a thump; a match scratched and a flight of shadows shook across thedoorway. The light did not serve to make the room visible; it fellwholly upon his own mind and troubled him like the waves which spreadfrom the dropping of the smallest pebble and lap against the last shoresof a pool. Dumfounded by her casual surety, he remained another momentwith the rein in the hollow of his arm.

  Finally he decided to mount as silently as possible and ride off throughthe night away from her. The consequences to her reputation if theyspent the night so closely together was one reason; a more selfish andmore moving one was the trouble which she gave him. The finding anddisposing of Drew should be the one thing to occupy his thoughts, butthe laughter of the girl the moment before had suddenly obsessed him,wiped out the rest of the world, enmeshed them hopelessly together inthe solemn net of the night, the silence. He resented it; in a vague wayhe was angry with Sally Fortune.

  His foot was in the stirrup when it occurred to him that no matter howsoftly he withdrew she would know and follow him. It seemed to Anthonythat for the first time in his life he was not alone. In other dayssocial bonds had fallen very lightly on him; the men he knew wereacquaintances, not friends; the women had been merely borderdecorations, variations of light and shadow which never shone reallydeep into the stream of his existence; even his father had not been nearhim; but by the irresistible force of circumstances which he could notcontrol, this girl was forced bodily upon his consciousness.

  Now he heard a cheery, faint crackling from the house and a rosy glowpervaded the gloom beyond the doorway. It brought home to Anthony thefact that he was tired; weariness went through all his limbs like thesound of music. Music in fact, for the girl was singing softly--toherself.

  He took his foot from the stirrup, unsaddled, and carried the saddleinto the room. He found Sally crouched at the fire and piling bits ofwood on the rising flame. Her face was squinted to avoid the smoke, andshe sheltered her eyes with one hand. At his coming she smiled brieflyup at him and turned immediately back to the fire. The silence of thatsmile brought their comradeship sharply home to him. It was as if sheunderstood his weariness and knew that the fire was infinitelycomforting. Anthony frowned; he did not wish to be understood. It wasirritating--indelicate.

  He sat on one of the bunks, and when she took her place on the other hestudied her covertly, with side glances, for he was beginning to feelstrangely self-conscious. It was the situation rather than the girl thatgained upon him, but he felt shamed that he should be so uncertain ofhimself and so liable to expose some weakness before the girl.

  That in turn raised a blindly selfish desire to make her feel andacknowledge his mastery. He did not define the emotion exactly, nor seeclearly what he wished to do, but in a general way he wanted to benecessary to her, and to let her know at the same time that she wasnothing to him. He was quite sure that the opposite was the truth justnow.

  At this point he shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should haveslipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating abenefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the samevicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with animpersonal, coldly critical eye. It was not easy to do, for she sat withher head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the firemore fully. The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, mingled withretrospection.

  Here he lost the trend of his thoughts by beginning to wonder of whatshe could be thinking, but he called himself back sharply to theanalysis of her features. It was a game with which he had often amusedhimself among the girls of his eastern acquaintance. Their beauty, afterall, was their only weapon, and when he discovered that that weapon wasnot of pure steel, they became nothing; it was like pushing them awaywith an arm of infinite length.

  There was food for criticism in Sally's features. The nose, of course,was tipped up a bit, and the mouth too large, but Anthony discoveredthat it was almost impossible to centre his criticism on either feature.The tip-tilt of the nose suggested a quaint and infinitely buoyantspirit; the mouth, if generously wide, was exquisitely made. She wascertainly not pretty, but he began to feel with equal certainty that shewas beautiful.

  A waiting mood came on him while he watched, as one waits through agreat symphony and endures the monotonous passages for the sake of thesinging bursts of harmony to which the commoner parts are a necessarybackground. He began to wish that she would turn her head so that hecould see her eyes. They were like the inspired part of that samesymphony, a beauty which could not be remembered and was always new,satisfying. He could make her turn by speaking, and knowing that thiswas so, he postponed the pleasure like a miser who will only count hisgold once a day.

  From the side view he dwelt on the short, delicately carved upper lipand the astonishingly pleasant curve of the cheek.

  "Look at me," he said abruptly.

  She turned, observed him calmly, and then glanced back to the fire. Sheasked no question.

  Her chin rested on her hands, now, so that when she spoke her headnodded a little and gave a significance to what she said.

  "The grey doesn't belong to you?"

  So she was thinking of horses!

  "Well," she repeated.

  "No."

  "Hoss-lifting," she mused.

  "Why shouldn't I take a horse when they had shot down mine?"

  She turned to him again, and this time her gaze went over him slowly,curiously, but without speaking she looked back to the fire, as thoughexplanation of what "hoss-lifting" meant were something far beyond thegrasp of his mentality. His anger
rose again, childishly, sullenly, andhe had to arm himself with indifference.

  "Who'd you drop, Bard?"

  "The one they call Calamity Ben."

  "Is he done for?"

  "Yes."

  The turmoil of the scene of his escape came back to him so vividly thathe wondered why it had ever been blurred to obscurity.

  She said: "In a couple of hours we'd better ride on."