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 snatch her from the saddle. Possessed
by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon 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?"
"Assuredly! 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 damn 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 glasses 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.