SIX FEET FOUR!
Winifred Waverly looked steadily into Buck Thornton's eyes, suddenly
determined that she would see in them the guile which must be there.
Surely a man could not do the things which this man so brazenly did, and
not show something of it! And she saw a glance as steady as her own,
eyes as clear and filled with a very frank admiration. In spite of her,
her color rose and her eyes wavered a little. Then she noticed that Mrs.
Sturgis's keen eyes were upon her, and swiftly drove the expression from
her own eyes and returned Thornton's greeting indifferently. Some day
her uncle would accuse this man, but she did not care to give her
personal affair over to the tongue of gossip, nor did she care to have
her name linked in any way with Buck Thornton's.
"May I have this dance, Miss Waverly?"
He had put out his arm as though her affirmative were a foregone
conclusion. She stared at him, wondering where were the limits to this
man's audacity. Then, before she could reply, Mrs. Sturgis had answered
for her. For Mrs. Sturgis was a born match maker, Buck was like a son to
her motherly heart, Winifred Waverly was the "sweetest little thing"
she had ever seen, and they had in them the making of such a couple as
Mrs. Sturgis couldn't find every day of the week.
"Go 'long with you, Buck Thornton!" she cried, making a monumental
failure of the frown with which she tried to draw her placid brows.
"Here I thought all the time you was goin' to ask me!"
Then she jerked him by the arm, dragging him nearer, playfully pushed
the girl toward him, and before she well knew what had happened Winifred
found herself in Thornton's arms, whirling with him to the merry-fiddled
music, putting out her little slipper by the side of his big boot to the
step of the rye-waltz. And Mrs. Sturgis, drawing her twinkling eyes away
from them and turning upon Ben Broderick, who had arrived just too late,
with as much malice in her smile as she knew how to put into it,
remarked meaningly,
"A little slow, Mr. Broderick! You got to keep awake when there's a man
like Buck around."
And she seemed very much pleased with the look in Broderick's eyes, a
look of blended surprise and irritation.
"Thornton and her uncle are not just exactly friends," he retorted
coolly.
"If they was," she flung back at him, "I'd think a heap sight more of
ol' Ben Pollard!"
Mrs. Sturgis's manoeuvre had so completely taken the girl by surprise
that as she floated away in the cowboy's arms she was for a little
undecided what to do. She did not want to dance with Thornton; it had
been upon the tip of her tongue to make the old excuse and tell him that
she was engaged for this waltz. In that way the whole episode would have
passed unnoticed. But now, if they stopped, if she had him take her to
her seat and leave her, everybody would see, everybody would talk,
gossip would remember that when she had first come to Hill's Corners
John Smith had ridden with her as far as the Bar X, and that Smith had
told there how Buck Thornton had ridden as far as his place with her;
and then gossip would go on into endless speculation as to what had
happened upon the trail which now made her refuse to dance with him.
That was why she hesitated, undecided, at first. Then Thornton began to
speak and she wanted to know what he was going to say. Besides, she
admitted to herself, begrudgingly, that she had never known a man dance
as this man danced, and the magic of the waltz was on her.
"I had to return something you left at Harte's Camp," were his first
words. "That's the reason I rode over tonight."
"What is it?" she asked quickly.
Now suddenly there rose up into her heart a swift hope that after all he
was not entirely without principle, that he had grown ashamed of having
taken from a girl the money with which she had been entrusted and that
he was bringing it back to her. If he were man enough to do this ... the
blood ran up higher in her cheeks at the thought ... she could almost
forgive him for that other thing he had done.
So they moved on in the dance, her hand resting lightly in his, his
fingers closing about it with no hint of a pressure to tell her that
again he would take what small advantage he could, his eyes looking
gravely down into the eyes which flashed up at him with her question.
"Didn't you lose anything that night?" he countered. "In the cabin after
I went for the horses?"
"Well?" she countered, the quick hope leaping higher within her.
"You did?"
She wondered why his eyes were so grave, so stern now, why they had
ceased to say flattering things of her and merely hinted of a mind at
work on a puzzle. How could she know that while she was thinking of a
yellow, cloth lined envelope, he was thinking of a horse lamed with a
knife, and hoping to learn from her something of the man who had wounded
the animal?
"Well?" she asked again, hardly above a whisper. Did he dare even talk
of it here, among all these men and women? She glanced about her
anxiously to see if Pollard were in the room. "You are going to give it
back to me?"
Her wonderment was hardly more than Thornton's. Why should she show this
eager excitement, because of a lost spur rowel?
"I rode over to give it to you," he answered, swinging her clear of an
eddy in the swirl of dancers and to the edge of the crowd. "First,
though, I want you to tell me something. A man came into the cabin about
three minutes before you came out to the barn, didn't he?"
She had lowered her eyes, aware that people were noticing them, her
looking up so earnestly, him looking down into her face so gravely. But
now, in spite of her, she looked up at him again.
"Why do you ask that?" she demanded with a flash of anger that he should
continue this useless pretence. "Do you think I am a fool?"
"No. I am asking because I want to know. It's a safe gamble that the man
you had a tussel with is the man who lamed my horse."
"Is it?" she asked with cool sarcasm. "And it's just as safe a gamble
that he is a coward and a ... brute!"
"I don't know about his being a coward, and I don't care about his being
a brute," he told her steadily. "But I do want to know what he looks
like."
Again she called herself a little fool and bit her lip in the surge of
her vexation. She had been glad and over eager just now to restore her
faith to this big brut of a man; at a mere word from him she had been
ready to condone a crime and forgive an insult.... She felt her face
grow hot; he had kissed her rudely and she had been willing to find
excuses, she had even felt as odd sort of thrill tingling through her.
And now this eternal play-acting of his, this insane pretence....
"Mr. Thornton, this is getting us nowhere," she reminded him coldly. "If
you care to be told I can assure you that I know perfectly well who the
man was who ... who came into the cabin that night. And I think that it
would be for the best if you returned ... my property!"
"I'm going to return it. Now, will you answer my question? Will you tell
me who that man was?"
"Why do you pretend in this stupid way?" she demanded hotly.
"Why don't you tell me who he was?" he returned, frowning a little.
For a moment she did not answer. Then, her voice very low, she said,
speaking slowly,
"I don't tell you, Mr. Thornton, because you know as well as I do!"
She saw nothing but blank amazement in his eyes.
"If I knew I wouldn't be asking you," he informed her.
Again she looked up at him, their eyes meeting steadily, searchingly.
"You say that you don't know who it was?" she challenged. And the eyes
into which she looked were as clear of guile as a mountain lake when he
answered:
"No. I don't know!"
Then through lips which were moulded to a passionate scorn no less of
self than of him, in a fierce whisper, she paid him in the coin of her
contempt with the one word: "_Liar_!"
She saw the anger leap up into his eyes and the red run into his bronzed
skin, she felt the arm about her contract tensely until for one dizzy
second she thought that he would crush her. And then they were swinging
on through the dance to the merry beat of the music and above the music
she heard his soft laugh.
He did not look at her, nor did she again lift her eyes to his. But both
of them saw Broderick where he stood near the door, his hands shoved
down into his pockets, his tall, gaunt form leaning against the wall.
His eyes had been following them, and there was in them an expression
hard to read. It might have been anger or distrust or suspicion.
And both Thornton and Winifred as they turned in the dance caught a
quick glimpse of the face of another man. It was Henry Pollard. He had
evidently just come in and as evidently had not seen Thornton and his
niece dancing together until this moment. And the look in his eyes
springing up naked and startled was a thing easy to read. For it was the
look of fear!
Winifred Waverly tried to tell herself that it was fear for her, at
seeing her in Thornton's arms. But she knew that it was not. Nor was it
fear for himself, not mere physical fear of Thornton. Already she knew
of her uncle that the man was no coward. It was not that kind of fear;
it was a fear that was apprehension, dread lest something might happen.
What? "_Dread that something he did not want her to know might become
known to her in her talk with Buck Thornton!_"
It was as though a voice had shouted it in her ear. Where so many things
were muddled in inexplicability this one matter seemed suddenly
perfectly clear to her. He had not wanted her to talk with Buck
Thornton! Why?
Thornton, with no further word to her, had bowed to her, his eyes hard
and stern, and taking a paper-wrapped packet from his vest pocket had
given it to her, and had walked swiftly to the door near which Broderick
stood. In spite of her her eyes had gone down the room after the tall
figure. And then something happened which could have meant nothing to
any one else in the house, but which brought leaping up into the girl's
heart both fear and gladness. And, at last, understanding.
Broderick, smiling, had said some light word to Thornton, laying his
hand upon the cowboy's shoulder. For a moment, just the fraction of a
second the two men stood side by side in the open doorway. Until they
stood so, close together, a man would have said that they were of the
same height. Now Winifred marked that there was a full two-inch
difference and that Thornton was the taller.
Together they stepped out through the doorway. The door was low, Buck
stooped his head a little, Broderick passed out without stooping! It
seemed only last night that she had made her supper in the Harte camp
with Buck Thornton. She remembered so distinctly each little event. She
could see him now as he had sat making his cigarette, could see him
going to the door to look at the upclimbing moon. She had marked then
the tall, wiry body that must stoop a little to stand in the low
doorway. She had jested about his height; the six-feet-four of him, as
he called it....
She could see again the man who had come in, masked, the man whose
clothes were like the clothes of Buck Thornton even to the grey neck
handkerchief. She could remember that this man had stood in the same
doorway, that his eyes had gleamed at her through the slits in the
handkerchief,... that he had held his head thrown back, that he had not
stooped!
"It wasn't Buck Thornton!" she whispered to herself, her hands going
white in their tense grip upon the parcel they held. "A man did lame his
horse, a man who wanted me to think all the time that it was Buck
Thornton. And that man," with swift certainty, "is Ben Broderick! Uncle
Henry's friend. And Uncle ... knows!"