Over the Border Part 23

Gordon's glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then-the tricks fancy plays us! _Fonda_ and ravine faded into a glade in a Java forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice.

"I wish you all happiness!"

The crash of Lee's gla.s.s as she threw it among the stones brought him back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the canon.

Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder.

Gordon's practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to a.s.sert itself. He spoke very quietly. "We'd better catch her before she breaks her neck."

XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED

Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden more recklessly.

Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks that reached down gnarled hands to s.n.a.t.c.h her from the saddle. Possessed by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the canon and out upon the plain.

Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon's, to catch up.

Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. "Little Wicked One!" he called, coming up. "Have a care for my happiness if not for your neck!" But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded from his own. "Why, queridita? What-"

"I want you to leave me now." She cut him abruptly off.

His big eyes widened. "After raising me to heaven would you plunge me in-"

"Ah no, no!" She impulsively thrust out her hand. "You have earned far more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But-"

"Si? But-"

She gave him a little wan smile. "When you come to understand girls better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the cause."

"But-"

"Ramon," she looked at him with sweet severity, "if I had told you on top of the mountain what I said back there-wouldn't you have been content?"

"a.s.suredly! It was only-"

"Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now-and stay till I either send or come. It won't be long-I promise."

"Bueno," he shrugged. "Though minutes will be ages!"

Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off to the north.

His departure left her free to review the situation-with little satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out-in a moment of pique she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.

"You flirted with him," she berated herself. "Led him on to an avowal; accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserable _thing_, and now you'll go through with it."

It never occurred to her that, being so "mean and despicable" it might be against Ramon's interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with her girl's illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice.

She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal-the chief, if unconscious, cause of it all-was getting along; and though he was too far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting dejection.

As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as-as she could have wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.

"It's a d.a.m.n shame!" he told himself. "Ramon seems a good sort, but-no greaser is good enough for her!" While the bright, hard specks floated up in his eye, he added, "And it isn't going to be."

For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by open confession. But realizing that two gla.s.ses of anisette plus a vagrant inclination-even if the latter were based on a sense of injury-might not appeal to her woman's logic, he kept his distance.

Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed their hopelessness.

"Poor girl!" he pitied her.

"He's feeling terribly," she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.

Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her heroic mood. "Our friends"-she nodded toward the distant buildings-"are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to yourself."

He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.

At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the _patio_ gate, Lee did cheer up a little-partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave.

Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the droop of her shoulders and Gordon's air of gloom.

He was not to be deceived. "Been fighting. Wonder what it's all about."

He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow's recipe for "liniment," after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the stable. It ran:

"Dear Friend,-Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the _fonda_ the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob.

It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon." In her ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: "But there is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the _fonda_, I am sure things will turn out all right."

Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the signature "Your friend, Mary Mills." Gordon had almost finished caring for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, he fished for further information.

"Any one else there?" he inquired, nonchalantly.

"Young Mexican," Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive curtness.

"Ramon Icarza, I reckon." Bull went innocently on: "He an' Miss Lee were almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of him-"

"No reason why she shouldn't."

Nevertheless, the tone caused Bull to duck behind Lee's horse to hide a chuckle. "Jealous! green-cheese jealous. Mary-" he paused, reddening, for never before in his thought had he used her given name. He repeated it with lingering delight. "Mary-was right. We've sure stirred 'em up.

On'y we'll have to 'tend to Felicia at once."

His mind thus made up, he proceeded to Felicia's solution with the characteristic directness he gave to any problem. When, after supper that evening, Gordon went straight to the bunk-house, Bull herded Jake and Sliver into the stable to deliberate by lantern-light.

"You-all never orter ha' taken him there," he charged Sliver. "Here we go an' import this young fellow at no end of trouble an' expense, then you herd him right into the arms of another girl."

"Aw! she don't count." Sliver excused himself. "She's Mex an' wild girl." He sagely added: "You see, I was that anxious to make sure he didn't drink. We kain't have no young soaks 'round Lady-girl."

His solicitude drew Jake's satirical grin. "You wasn't looking for a drink yourself, heigh? As for her being Mex an' wild-you d.a.m.n fool, don't you know that at his age wild girls draws like wild honey. He's be'n there once an' he'll go again."