CHAPTER XXXIV. CRITICISM

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

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

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

"You've shown me the short cut, all right," he said, "and I thank you a thousand 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. In another moment she had untied the cinch and drawn off the saddle. She held its weight easily on one forearm. Actions, after all, are more eloquent than words.

"I suppose," he said gloomily, "that if I'd asked you to stay you'd have ridden off at once?" She did not answer for a moment, and he strained his eyes to read her expression through the dark. At length she laughed with a new note in her voice that drew her strangely close to him. During the long ride he had 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 wild trail; but now the laughter in an instant rubbed all this away. It was rather low, and with a throaty quality of richness. The pulse of the sound was like a light finger tapping some marvellously sensitive chord within him.

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

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

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

His foot was in the stirrup when it occurred to him that no matter how softly he withdrew she would know and follow him. It seemed to Anthony that for the first time in his life he was not alone. In other days social bonds had fallen very lightly on him; the men he knew were acquaintances, not friends; the women had been merely border decorations, variations of light and shadow which never shone really deep into the stream of his existence; even his father had not been near him; but by the irresistible force of circumstances which he could not control, this girl was forced bodily upon his consciousness.

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

He took his foot from the stirrup, unsaddled, and carried the saddle into the room. He found Sally crouched at the fire and piling bits of wood on the rising flame. Her face was squinted to avoid the smoke, and she sheltered her eyes with one hand. At his coming she smiled briefly up at him and turned immediately back to the fire. The silence of that smile brought their comradeship sharply home to him. It was as if she understood his weariness and knew that the fire was infinitely comforting. Anthony frowned; he did not wish to be understood. It was irritating—indelicate.

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

That in turn raised a blindly selfish desire to make her feel and acknowledge his mastery. He did not define the emotion exactly, nor see clearly what he wished to do, but in a general way he wanted to be necessary to her, and to let her know at the same time that she was nothing to him. He was quite sure that the opposite was the truth just now.

At this point he shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should have slipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating a benefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the same vicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with an impersonal, coldly critical eye. It was not easy to do, for she sat with her head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the fire more fully. The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, mingled with retrospection.

Here he lost the trend of his thoughts by beginning to wonder of what she could be thinking, but he called himself back sharply to the analysis of her features. It was a game with which he had often amused himself among the girls of his eastern acquaintance. Their beauty, after all, was their only weapon, and when he discovered that that weapon was not of pure steel, they became nothing; it was like pushing them away with 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 discovered that it was almost impossible to centre his criticism on either feature. The tip-tilt of the nose suggested a quaint and infinitely buoyant spirit; the mouth, if generously wide, was exquisitely made. She was certainly not pretty, but he began to feel with equal certainty that she was beautiful.

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

From the side view he dwelt on the short, delicately carved upper lip and 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. She asked no question.

Her chin rested on her hands, now, so that when she spoke her head nodded 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 though explanation of what "hoss-lifting" meant were something far beyond the grasp of his mentality. His anger rose again, childishly, sullenly, and he 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 that he wondered why it had ever been blurred to obscurity.

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