The Claim Jumpers Part 27

"I wrote to Bishop," he said, "and told him all about it. In his answer, which I'll show you, he took all the blame to himself, just as I antic.i.p.ated he would, and he's so tickled to death over the showing made by the a.s.says that he's coming out here himself to see about development. So I'm afraid you're going to lose your job."

"I'm not sorry to go home. But I'm sorry to leave the Hills." He looked wistfully through the twilight toward Mary's slender figure, outlined against the window. The three men caught the glance, and began at once to talk in low tones to each other. In a moment they went out. Somehow, on returning from the land of visions, Ben found that the world had moved, and that one of the results of the movement was that many things were taken for granted by the little community of four who surrounded him. It was as though the tangle had unravelled quietly while he slept.

She leaned toward him shyly, and whispered something to his ear. He smiled contentedly.

They talked then long and comfortably in the dusk--about how the Leslies had written the letter, how much trouble she had taken to conceal her real ident.i.ty, and all the rest.

"I sent Bill Lawton up to warn your camp the first day I met you," said she.

"Why, I remember!" he cried. "He was there when I got back."

And they talked on of their many experiences, in the fashion of lovers, and how they had come to care for each other, and when.

"I made up my mind it was so foolish a joke," she confessed, "that I determined to tell you all about it. You remember I had something to tell you at the Pioneer's Picnic? That was it. But then you remember the girl in the train, and how, when she looked at us, you turned away?"

"I remember that well enough," replied Bennington. "But what has that to do with it?"

"It was a perfectly natural thing to do, dearest. I see that plainly enough now. But it hurt me a little that you should be ashamed of me as a Western girl, and I made up my mind to test you."

"Why, I wasn't thinking of that at all," cried Bennington. "I was just ashamed of my clothes. I never thought of you!"

She reached out and patted his hand. "I'm glad to hear that, Ben dear, after all. It did hurt. And I was so foolish. I thought if you were ashamed of me, you would never stand the thought of the Lawtons. So I did not tell you the truth then, but resolved to test you in that way."

"Foolish little girl!" said he tenderly. "But it came out all right, didn't it?"

"Yes," she sighed, with a happy gesture of the hands. They fell silent.

"I want you to tell me something, dear," said Bennington after a while.

"You needn't unless you want to, but I've thought about it a great deal."

"I will tell you, Ben, anything in the world. We ought to be frank with each other now, don't you think so?"

"I don't know as I ought to say anything about it, after all," he hesitated, evidently embarra.s.sed. "But, Mary, you know you have hinted a little at it yourself. You remember you said something once about losing faith, and being made hard, and----"

She took both his hands in hers and drew them closely to her breast.

Although he could not see her eyes against the dusk, he knew that she was looking at him steadily.

"Listen quietly, Ben dear, and I will tell you. Before I came out here I thought I loved a man, and he--well, he did not treat me well. I had trusted him and every one else implicitly until the very moment when----I felt it very much, and I came West with Jim to get away from the old scenes. Now I know that it was only fascination, but it was very real then. You do not like that, Ben, do you? The memory is not pleasant to me, and yet," she said, with a wistful little break of the voice, "if it hadn't been for that I would not have been the woman I am, and I could not love you, dearest, as I do. It is never in the same way twice, but each time something better and higher is added to it.

Oh, my darling, I _do_ love you, I do love you so much, and you must be always my generous, poetic _boy_, as you are now."

She strained his hands to her as though afraid he would slip from her clasp. "All that is ideal so soon hardens. I can not bear to think of your changing."

Bennington leaned forward and their lips met. "We will forgive him," he murmured.

And what that remark had to do with it only our gentler readers will be able to say.

Ah, the delicious throbbing silence after the first kiss!

"What was your decision that afternoon on the Rock, Ben? You never told me." She asked presently, in a lighter tone, "Would you have taken me in spite of my family?"

He laughed with faint mischief.

"Before I tell you, I want to ask _you_ something," he said in his turn. "Supposing I had decided that, even though I loved you, I must give you up because of my duty to my family--suppose that, I say--what would _you_ have done? Would your love for me have been so strong that you would have finally confessed to me the fact that the Lawtons were not your parents? Or would you have thrown me over entirely because you thought I did not love you enough to take you for yourself?"

She considered the matter seriously for some little time.

"Ben, I don't know," she confessed at last frankly. "I can't tell."

"No more can I, sweetheart. I hadn't decided."

She puckered her brows in the darkness with genuine distress. Women worry more than men over past intangibilities. He smiled comfortably to himself, for in his grasp he held, unresisting, the dearest little hand in the world. Outside, the ever-charming, ever-mysterious night of the Hills was stealing here and there in sighs and silences. From the darkness came the high sweet tenor of Bert Leslie's voice in the words of a song:

"A Sailor to the Sea, a Hunter to the Pines, And Sea and Pines alike to joy the Rover, The Wood-smells to the nostrils of the Lover of the Trail, And Hearts to Hearts the whole World over!"

Through and through the words of the song, like a fine silver wire through richer cloth of gold, twined the long-drawn, tremulous notes of the white-throated sparrow, the nightingale of the North.

"The dear old Hills," he murmured tenderly. "We must come back to them often, sweetheart."

"I wish, I _wish_ I knew!" she cried, holding his hand tighter.

"Knew what?" he asked, surprised.

"What you'd have done, and what I'd have done!"

"Well," he replied, with a happy sigh, "I know what I'm _going_ to do, and that's quite enough for me."

THE END