The Fifth Ace Part 10

"I?" he laughed with a trace of bitterness. "I am a rolling stone, Miss Murdaugh. My work calls me to the ends of the earth, but I would probably have looked in on you every few years to say 'h.e.l.lo.'

However, you would scarcely have been with my sister as long as that.

Some lucky fellow would have persuaded you to make him happy. You will be a great social success----"

"As if I cared!" She stopped him with her familiar little gesture.

"I--I didn't just understand what you meant. I thought--but it doesn't matter anyway, does it? I've got to get in the game anyway, but you don't suppose I want to, do you? You don't suppose I want the money of that old man who stacked the cards against my poor father, or care about these Halstead people that never knew I was alive? I am doing it because I think Dad would want me to, and because it will help me in something else I've set out to do."

"The thing you spoke of, that you could not let me or anyone in on?" he asked in surprise. "Haven't you relinquished it, whatever it was?

You'll be too much taken up with your new life to remember old plans and ideas when you plunge into the society game."

"'Relinquish'?" she repeated, and he saw her whole form grow tense and rigid. "Why, it's what I'm living for--what I'm going through with this inheritance outfit for! Dad said the Indians were right, they never forget a kindness or an injury. I'm like them, in that. I'll never forget, never, until the score is wiped clean!"

"Someone has hurt you?" he demanded. "You have another trouble, aside from your grief? The government will take care of El Negrito, it must be something else. Won't you tell me? It may be that I can help, in some way. I--I would do anything for you!"

"n.o.body can help me." She shook her head gently. "I told you once, Mr. Thode, that I must play a lone hand."

"But you can trust me," he urged. "If I could only make you believe that! If I could only make you see how much it would mean to me to be of the slightest service----"

He halted abruptly, and she waited, scarcely breathing, for there was an impetuous fervent ring in his tones which made her heart leap suddenly and then almost cease to beat. But the young man did not continue.

"Thank you," she said at last, very quietly. "I am sure that I could trust you, Mr. Thode, but there is nothing you or anyone could do; it is just that I owe a debt to someone, and I mean to pay it. But don't let us talk of that any more. Shall I see you, sometime, up in New York?"

"Perhaps, when my work here is finished." He turned his head away from her. "You will have so many new friends that you will scarcely remember those you leave behind down here."

"How unjust you are!" She faced him hotly. "Do you think I could ever forget what you did when El Negrito came; how you rode to the barracks at the risk of your life?"

"I had small choice," he reminded her. "Had I stayed I would have been killed."

"So would we all. But it was not for yourself you took the chance, it was for us." She laid her hand upon his arm. "I--I don't want you to think that I will ever forget and I hope that we shall be friends."

"Always that!" He took her small hand in both of his. "It doesn't seem likely, but if there is ever anything that I can do for you, any service that I can render, I would like to feel, in spite of the little time you have known me, that you would call on me before anyone else you may meet. After all, Gentleman Geoff laid a charge upon me, you know, and I want to be worthy of it. When I return, if I may, I will come to you."

"Oh, will you?" She flushed and gently withdrew her hand. "That is, unless you will be ashamed of me. I reckon I'll be kind of a shock to city folks, the same as they'll be to me."

"Now it is you who are unjust!" he cried. "I shall always be proud of your friendship, and remember these days in Limasito as the most wonderful I have ever known----"

Thode checked himself once more.

"Good-bye, Billie. When next I see you, it will be Miss Willa Murdaugh who will greet me, but it is Gentleman Geoff's Billie who will linger in my thoughts always. Will you say once again what you said to me in the lane: 'Buena suerte'?"

"Good luck, with all my heart, but not good-bye." She hesitated. "I sha'n't see you to-morrow before we start?"

He shook his head.

"The whole town will be on hand to give you a send-off. I would not intrude on the leave-taking of all your old friends, and besides I must ride far out to-morrow," he prevaricated. "There is a lease I must look into for the company over near La Roda. So it must be good-bye, now."

"Not that, but hasta la vista!" She lifted her chin valiantly, although her smile was a trifle wan. "That means 'until we meet again', you know, and I feel somehow that it will be soon."

"I hope so, with all my heart!" With a swift, impetuous movement he bent and kissed her hand. "Hasta la vista!"

Billie watched him until he disappeared down the avenue of flowering trees, then, brushing her hand across her eyes, she turned and went into the house.

Sallie Bailey looked up with a twinkle from the shirt she was patching.

"Well, carita, did he?" she demanded with much interest.

"Did he what?" Billie paused at the foot of the stairs.

"Did he--say anything?"

"Oh, a heap. I'm going to be a hit in society and forget all my friends and everything down here and roll in that money like a pinto in the pasture. I wish to goodness that I was dead!"

"No, you don't," Sallie retorted comfortably. "You're just beginning to take notice, that's all, and so's he. He ain't saddle-broke yet and he's gun-shy, but he'll get used to the report o' that money o' yours in time. Men are a good deal like pintos; some you can coax and some you can bully, but they all of 'em buck at the first gate. Don't you worry your head about Mr. Kearn Thode, honey; wait till the next round-up, and you'll have him roped, tied, and branded before he knows where he's at."

Billie mounted three steps and halted, her head held high.

"Him?" she queried with infinite scorn. "I don't want him! Dad asked him to look out for me, you see, and he thinks I'm kind of on his hands, but I'll show him! I'm liable to make some big mistakes, and I reckon that Mrs. Halstead will earn all the money my grandfather left her to teach me the rules of the game, but I'll sit tight and learn if it breaks me and when it comes my turn to play, I'll show them all I'm not a piker, anyway!"

"You wasn't ever that, Billie," the older woman observed gently, for the girl's hurt heart was on her sleeve. "I reckon he only meant to be kind."

"I don't want kindness!" the ungrateful Billie responded savagely. "I don't want condescension and duty-friendship. I want, I want--oh, I want Dad!"

Limasito was indeed out in full force to speed her on her way the following morning. The news had traveled quickly over the countryside and every style of conveyance, from a mule-team to the latest improved jitney, lined the plaza. White, Mex', and Mongolian, from the richest oil operator to the lowliest peon, her friends had gathered to say farewell.

They stampeded her on the Calle Rivera and unceremoniously held up Mr.

North's impressive car before the hotel, while Jim Baggott, in an ancient silk hat and bibulously primed for the occasion, read an ungrammatical but fervent valediction.

Billie could only throw both hands out to them, laughing and sobbing in one breath as the car moved off down a lane of solidly packed humanity and disappeared in a whirl of dust.

"'S on the house!" Jim Baggott waved toward the bar with one hand and openly wiped his eyes with the other. "Gonna make a gosh-almighty swell of her, are they? Well, I wish'm luck, but they'll never change her heart or break her spirit. She's our'n, an' she'll come back if I have to go after her myself, so help me! What you-all have?"

True to his word, Kearn Thode had ridden out at daybreak and ridden hard, but only the pinto knew where they were going and he was too jaded to care. A sleepless night of bewilderment and self-disgust at his own surly, unaccountable mood had brought a revelation that stunned and humbled him.

He loved her! In a blinding flash of realization, he saw that from the moment of their first meeting she had possessed him, body and soul. It was that which had stirred his resentment to berserk rage when Starr Wiley had laid insolent hands upon her in the lane; it was for her and her alone that he had run the gantlet of El Negrito's forces and dared the desperate ride.

And she? Immeasurably removed from him now, impenetrably walled in from his presumptuous gaze by the newly-gained inheritance, there was yet a golden key which he might find here in this flower-grown wilderness which would grant him entrance to her world on an equal footing with all men. She could not have learned to care for him in their few hours of companionship, but at least no one else held claim to her. There was still a chance!

It was characteristic of him that, having worked out his problem, he wasted no thought on futile regret or selfish repining at the fortune which had smiled on her. It should smile on him, too, and then, and not till then, he would go to her.

The Pool of the Lost Souls! That was the solution, that the golden key to the future! That others had been before him in the fruitless search of weary generations past was of no moment in the fire of his enthusiasm.

The noontide blaze of heat found him many miles upon an unfamiliar road, and, heedless of lurking enemies in the undergrowth, he flung himself down in the shade of a mighty orchid-laden tree, while the puzzled but equable pinto grazed nearby.

Worn with the emotional conflict through which he had pa.s.sed, and the sleepless night preceding the hard-ridden hours, his day-dream faded into deep slumber and the shadows were slanting across the road when he awoke with a sudden start. No living thing was in sight save the pinto tethered close at hand; the road ran level and white and deserted as far as the eye could see and only the afternoon breeze rustled the dense foliage above and about him, yet Thode could have sworn that he was under observation.

He flung the thought from him with a laugh as he picked himself up, but it persisted in spite of his efforts to exorcise it. Something unexplained but almost tangible rode at his shoulder on the homeward way, and he caught himself more than once straining his ears for a betraying sound behind him. So acute was the sensation of surveillance that he pulled up abruptly around a sharp turn in the road and listened, but no following hoof-beats broke the stillness, and mentally deriding the notion, he cantered on into town.

His mid-day reverie had carried him back over every detail of the legend Ben Hallock had related of the Pool, and one chance remark returned to him with the force of an inspiration. Hallock himself had learned the story from a hunchbacked Mexican who had it from his grandmother, and the little Jose, the crippled victim of Starr Wiley's heedless brutality, had been hunchbacked; the old crone in the shack by the zapote trees, his grandmother, looked as if many mysteries and legends might be hidden behind her fierce, inscrutable eyes.

This was slender foundation on which to build a theory, but how else had the little lad awakened the vengeful antipathy of Wiley? What was it that he refused to tell him?