When they rode in to the _rancho_ that afternoon, the "wind"--that is,
Ramon--had not yet "blown in"; so there were no complications to
interfere with the widow's first attempts at diagnosis of the "case."
She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and
Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the
pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her
across to the veranda.
"Promising," she inwardly commented.
A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered
temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and
white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow's
bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:
"Ramon is coming."
"Yes? Isabel too?"
An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills's belief that the indifference
was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. "No, it was quite
accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along
their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and
show me to-day."
"Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy."
She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. "Never
missed a dab. William Benson's a fool--though, of course, she may have
changed her mind." This she proceeded to find out. "Your new man seems
nice?"
"He is." Followed a long description of Gordon's night vigil with the
child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, "But--"
"But what?"
"He's been going to see Felicia at the _fonda_. Sliver took him there,
one day, and he says that he has never been again. But--she's wearing
his watch-fob in her bosom-- Yes, yes! I know! A _peona_ will beg the
shoes off any man's feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting.
But--"
Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously
made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in _peonas_' bosoms, will
bear watching. "Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is
very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn't he
twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh--"
She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly
subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little
smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.
Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. "Oh, wouldn't that be
just too lovely! Is it--settled?"
The widow, of course, shook her head.
"But it will be."
"How do you know?" She was quite willing to be convinced.
"How do I know?" The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of
powder. "Just as if it depended on _him_. Just as if any woman--who
hasn't a harelip--can't marry any man she wants."
Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a "case," Mrs.
Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so
self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an
honest person, she owned up with a hug.
Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom
dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to
an equally keen if less discreet examination.
Betty's major premise agreed marvelously with Lee's and was stated with
the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the
subject from different distances and points of view. "I like you--only
not so well as Bull. You're nicer-looking, but--" A long pause
emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in
other ways. "I'm going to marry him when I grow up--that is, if mother
doesn't beat me to it!"
"Any danger of that?" Gordon laughed.
"You bet there is. Bull's dead in love with her, and she--of course, she
doesn't admit it, but _I know_."
"Well, well, isn't that fine!" Gordon really meant it. "Congratulations,
I suppose, are not yet in order."
"I should say _not_!" Betty's blue eyes widened with horror. "Don't you
_dare_! I'm not too big, yet, to be spanked"--she wriggled,
reminiscently--"and when mother's real mad she goes the limit.
Nevertheless, it's true." After a second calculating survey, she
concluded, "But if she grabs Bull, I _might_ marry you."
"If you only will," he pleaded, "I'll be _so-o_ good! Can't we consider
ourselves engaged?"
After a moment's thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. "No, I'm
afraid not."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because doesn't answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why."
"Because I'd only be disappointed again." She added, with a little sigh:
"All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You'll fall
in love with Lee."
"_I?_ With _Lee_?" His real surprise showed how little that contingency
had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of
apprehension colored his accent. "Now how do you figure that?"
"Because you'd be a fool if you didn't."
The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. "But--but, you
know, I am only her hired man?"
"That wouldn't count--if she liked you." After another examination: "And
she might do worse. _Gee!_ if I were only a man!"
"Yes?" he prompted. "If you were a man?"
"I'd love her so hard she'd just have to give in. I'd--"
But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her
mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue.
Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with
plentiful food for thought.
During the last two months he had seen Lee--riding the range, a pretty
lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in
her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a
girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the
sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it
with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there
something wrong with his head?
Presently he gained an inkling--he had been wearing another's colors!
She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance
of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his
view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with
thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the
Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the
inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet--these
and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his
brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure's trail!
He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were
really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one's joy in beautiful
things! Come to think of it--Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest!
He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant
tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the
gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the
upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding
her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall
dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the
course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the
earth's fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not
belong.
Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary
effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly
dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of
his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the _corredor_ swung
in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh,
stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!
It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it's the
feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but
actually triumphed over, Lee's severe man's riding-clothes, took a
billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings
under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the
dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure
rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps,
that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which,
without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.
"Why, Sister!" he returned her greeting of the morning. "What killing
clothes!"
"Right, Brother!" she answered, in kind. "That's what they're for."
Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of
course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary,
badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders' wit. But under
all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she
reacted to it--though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who
had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam
still sparkled in her eye.
"I wonder what she's up to?" The thought formed in Mrs. Mills's mind.