'Drag' Harlan Part 12

Harlan nodded.

"Then," she went on "your obligation--if you were under any--seems to have been completed. You need not have come out of your way."

"I was headed this way."

"To the Rancho Seco?" she questioned, astonished.

Again he nodded. But this time there was a slight smile on his lips.

Her own straightened, and her eyes glowed with a sudden suspicion.

"That's odd," she said; "very odd."

"What is?"

"That you should be on your way to the Rancho Seco--and that you should encounter father--that you should happen to reach Sentinel Rock about the time he was murdered."

He looked straight at her, noting the suspicion in her eyes. His low laugh had a hint of irony in it.

"I've heard of such things," he said.

"What?"

"About guys happenin' to run plumb into a murder when they was innocent of it--an' of them bein' accused of the murder."

It was the mocking light in his eyes that angered her, she believed--and the knowledge that he had been aware of her suspicion before it had become half formed in her mind.

"I'm not accusing you!" she declared.

"You said it was odd that I'd be headed this way--after I'd told you all there was to tell."

"It is!" she maintained.

"Well," he conceded; "mebbe it's odd. But I'm still headin' for the Rancho Seco. Mebbe I forgot to tell you that your father said I was to go--that he made me promise to go."

He had not mentioned that before; and the girl glanced sharply at him. He met the glance with a slow grin which had in it a quality of that subtleness she had noticed in him before. A shiver of trepidation ran over her. But she sat rigid in the saddle, determined she would not be afraid of him. For the exchange of talk between them, and his considerate manner--everything about him--had convinced her that he was much like other men--men who respect women.

"There is no evidence that father made you promise to go to the Rancho Seco."

"There wasn't no evidence that I made any promise to keep that man Deveny from herd-ridin' you," he said shortly, with a grin. "I'm sure goin' to the Rancho Seco."

"Suppose I should not wish it--what then?"

"I'd keep right on headin' for there--keepin' my promise."

"Do you always keep your promises?" she asked, mockery in her voice.

"When I make 'em. Usually, I don't do any promisin'. But when I do--that promise is goin' to be kept. If you ain't likin' my company, ma'am, why, I reckon there's a heap of trail ahead. An' I ain't afraid of gettin'

lost."

"Isn't that remarkable!" she jeered.

He looked at her with sober eyes. "If we're figurin' on hittin' the Rancho Seco before night we'll have to quit our ga.s.sin' an' do some travelin'," he advised. "Accordin' to the figures we've got about forty miles to ride, altogether. We've come about fifteen--an'," he looked at a silver watch which he drew from a pocket, "it's pretty near two now."

Without further words--for it seemed useless to argue the point upon which he was so obviously determined--Barbara urged Billy on, taking the lead.

For more than an hour she maintained the lead, riding a short distance in advance, and seemingly paying no attention to Harlan. Yet she noted that he kept about the same distance from her always--though she never permitted him to observe that she watched him, for her backward glances were taken out of the corners of her eyes, when she pretended to be looking at the country on one side or the other.

Harlan, however, noted the glances. And his lips curved into a faint grin as he rode. Once when he had dropped behind a little farther than usual, he leaned over and whispered into Purgatory's ear:

"She's sure ignorin' us, ain't she, you black son-of-a-gun! She ain't looked back here more'n three times in the last five minutes!"

And yet Harlan's jocular mood did not endure long. During those intervals in which Barbara kept her gaze straight ahead on the trail, Harlan regarded her with a grave intentness that betrayed the soberness of his thoughts.

In all his days he had seen no woman like her; and when she had come toward him in Lamo, with Higgins close behind her, he had been so astonished that he had momentarily forgotten Deveny and all the rest of them.

Women of the kind he had met had never affected him as Barbara had affected him. He had still a mental picture of her as she had come toward him, with her hair flying in a golden-brown ma.s.s over her shoulders; her wide, fear-lighted eyes seeking his with an expression of appeal so eloquent that it had sent a queer, thrilling, protective sensation over him.

And as she rode ahead of him it was the picture she had made _then_ that he saw; and the emotions that a.s.sailed him were the identical emotions that had beset him when for a brief instant, in Lamo, he had held her in his arms, with her head resting on his shoulder.

That, he felt, had been the real Barbara Morgan. Her manner now--the constrained and distant pose she had adopted, her suspicions, her indignation--all those were outward manifestations of the reaction that had seized her. The real Barbara Morgan was she who had run to him for protection and she would always be to him as she had appeared then--a soft, yielding, trembling girl who, at a glance had trusted him enough to run straight into his arms.

CHAPTER IX

AN UNWELCOME GUEST

It was late afternoon when Barbara and Harlan--the girl still riding a little in advance of the man--rode their horses out of a stretch of broken country featured by low, barren hills and ragged draws, and came to the edge of a vast level of sage and mesquite that stretched southward an interminable distance.

The sun was low--a flaming red disk that swam in a sea of ever-changing color between the towering peaks of two mighty mountains miles westward--and the sky above the big level upon which Barbara and Harlan rode was a pale amethyst set in the dull gray frame of the dusk that was rising from the southern and eastern horizons.

Eastward the gray was pierced by the burning, flaming prismatic streaks that stretched straight from the cleft in the mountains where the sun was sinking--the sun seemed to be sending floods of new color into the streaks as he went, deepening those that remained; tinging it all with harmonious tones--rose and pearl and violet and saffron blending them with a giant, magic brush--recreating them, making the whole background of amethyst sky glow like a huge jewel touched by the myriad colors of a mighty rainbow.

The trail taken by Barbara Morgan ran now, in a southeasterly direction, and it seemed to Harlan that they were riding straight into the folds of a curtain of gauze. For a haze was rising into the effulgent expanse of color, and the sun's rays, striking it, wrought their magic upon it.

Harlan, accustomed to sunsets--with a matter-of-fact att.i.tude toward all of nature's phenomena--caught himself admiring this one. So intent was he that he looked around with a start when Purgatory halted, to find that Barbara had drawn Billy down and was sitting in the saddle close to him, watching him, her eyes luminous with an emotion that thrilled Harlan strangely.

"This is the most beautiful place in the world," she declared in a voice that seemed to quaver with awe.

"It's sure a beauty," agreed Harlan. "I've been in a heap of places where they had sunsets, but dump 'em all together an' they wouldn't make an edge on this display. She's sure a hummer!"

The girl's eyes seemed to leap at his praise.

"I never want to leave this place," she said. "There is nothing like it.

Those two mountains that you see far out into the west--where the sun is going down--are about forty miles distant. If you will notice, you can see that there are other mountains--much smaller--connected with them.