Throughout the week Daylight found himself almost as much interested in
Bob as in Dede; and, not being in the thick of any big deals, he was
probably more interested in both of them than in the business game.
Bob's trick of whirling was of especial moment to him. How to overcome
it,--that was the thing. Suppose he did meet with Dede out in the
hills; and suppose, by some lucky stroke of fate, he should manage to
be riding alongside of her; then that whirl of Bob's would be most
disconcerting and embarrassing. He was not particularly anxious for
her to see him thrown forward on Bob's neck. On the other hand,
suddenly to leave her and go dashing down the back-track, plying quirt
and spurs, wouldn't do, either.
What was wanted was a method wherewith to prevent that lightning whirl.
He must stop the animal before it got around. The reins would not do
this. Neither would the spurs. Remained the quirt.
But how to accomplish it? Absent-minded moments were many that week,
when, sitting in his office chair, in fancy he was astride the
wonderful chestnut sorrel and trying to prevent an anticipated whirl.
One such moment, toward the end of the week, occurred in the middle of
a conference with Hegan. Hegan, elaborating a new and dazzling legal
vision, became aware that Daylight was not listening. His eyes had
gone lack-lustre, and he, too, was seeing with inner vision.
"Got it" he cried suddenly. "Hegan, congratulate me. It's as simple
as rolling off a log. All I've got to do is hit him on the nose, and
hit him hard."
Then he explained to the startled Hegan, and became a good listener
again, though he could not refrain now and again from making audible
chuckles of satisfaction and delight. That was the scheme. Bob always
whirled to the right. Very well. He would double the quirt in his
hand and, the instant of the whirl, that doubled quirt would rap Bob on
the nose. The horse didn't live, after it had once learned the lesson,
that would whirl in the face of the doubled quirt.
More keenly than ever, during that week in the office did Daylight
realize that he had no social, nor even human contacts with Dede. The
situation was such that he could not ask her the simple question
whether or not she was going riding next Sunday. It was a hardship of a
new sort, this being the employer of a pretty girl. He looked at her
often, when the routine work of the day was going on, the question he
could not ask her tickling at the founts of speech--Was she going
riding next Sunday? And as he looked, he wondered how old she was, and
what love passages she had had, must have had, with those college
whippersnappers with whom, according to Morrison, she herded and
danced. His mind was very full of her, those six days between the
Sundays, and one thing he came to know thoroughly well; he wanted her.
And so much did he want her that his old timidity of the apron-string
was put to rout. He, who had run away from women most of his life, had
now grown so courageous as to pursue. Some Sunday, sooner or later, he
would meet her outside the office, somewhere in the hills, and then, if
they did not get acquainted, it would be because she did not care to
get acquainted.
Thus he found another card in the hand the mad god had dealt him.
How important that card was to become he did not dream, yet he decided
that it was a pretty good card. In turn, he doubted. Maybe it was a
trick of Luck to bring calamity and disaster upon him. Suppose Dede
wouldn't have him, and suppose he went on loving her more and more,
harder and harder? All his old generalized terrors of love revived.
He remembered the disastrous love affairs of men and women he had known
in the past. There was Bertha Doolittle, old Doolittle's daughter, who
had been madly in love with Dartworthy, the rich Bonanza fraction
owner; and Dartworthy, in turn, not loving Bertha at all, but madly
loving Colonel Walthstone's wife and eloping down the Yukon with her;
and Colonel Walthstone himself, madly loving his own wife and lighting
out in pursuit of the fleeing couple. And what had been the outcome?
Certainly Bertha's love had been unfortunate and tragic, and so had the
love of the other three. Down below Minook, Colonel Walthstone and
Dartworthy had fought it out. Dartworthy had been killed. A bullet
through the Colonel's lungs had so weakened him that he died of
pneumonia the following spring. And the Colonel's wife had no one left
alive on earth to love.
And then there was Freda, drowning herself in the running mush-ice
because of some man on the other side of the world, and hating him,
Daylight, because he had happened along and pulled her out of the
mush-ice and back to life. And the Virgin.... The old memories
frightened him. If this love-germ gripped him good and hard, and if
Dede wouldn't have him, it might be almost as bad as being gouged out
of all he had by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer. Had his nascent
desire for Dede been less, he might well have been frightened out of
all thought of her. As it was, he found consolation in the thought
that some love affairs did come out right. And for all he knew, maybe
Luck had stacked the cards for him to win. Some men were born lucky,
lived lucky all their days, and died lucky. Perhaps, too, he was such
a man, a born luck-pup who could not lose.
Sunday came, and Bob, out in the Piedmont hills, behaved like an angel.
His goodness, at times, was of the spirited prancing order, but
otherwise he was a lamb. Daylight, with doubled quirt ready in his
right hand, ached for a whirl, just one whirl, which Bob, with an
excellence of conduct that was tantalizing, refused to perform. But no
Dede did Daylight encounter. He vainly circled about among the hill
roads and in the afternoon took the steep grade over the divide of the
second range and dropped into Maraga Valley. Just after passing the
foot of the descent, he heard the hoof beats of a cantering horse. It
was from ahead and coming toward him. What if it were Dede? He turned
Bob around and started to return at a walk. If it were Dede, he was
born to luck, he decided; for the meeting couldn't have occurred under
better circumstances. Here they were, both going in the same
direction, and the canter would bring her up to him just where the
stiff grade would compel a walk. There would be nothing else for her
to do than ride with him to the top of the divide; and, once there, the
equally stiff descent on the other side would compel more walking.
The canter came nearer, but he faced straight ahead until he heard the
horse behind check to a walk. Then he glanced over his shoulder. It
was Dede. The recognition was quick, and, with her, accompanied by
surprise. What more natural thing than that, partly turning his horse,
he should wait till she caught up with him; and that, when abreast they
should continue abreast on up the grade? He could have sighed with
relief. The thing was accomplished, and so easily. Greetings had been
exchanged; here they were side by side and going in the same direction
with miles and miles ahead of them.
He noted that her eye was first for the horse and next for him.
"Oh, what a beauty" she had cried at sight of Bob. From the shining
light in her eyes, and the face filled with delight, he would scarcely
have believed that it belonged to a young woman he had known in the
office, the young woman with the controlled, subdued office face.
"I didn't know you rode," was one of her first remarks. "I imagined
you were wedded to get-there-quick machines."
"I've just taken it up lately," was his answer. "Beginning to get
stout; you know, and had to take it off somehow."
She gave a quick sidewise glance that embraced him from head to heel,
including seat and saddle, and said:--
"But you've ridden before."
She certainly had an eye for horses and things connected with horses
was his thought, as he replied:--
"Not for many years. But I used to think I was a regular rip-snorter
when I was a youngster up in Eastern Oregon, sneaking away from camp to
ride with the cattle and break cayuses and that sort of thing."
Thus, and to his great relief, were they launched on a topic of mutual
interest. He told her about Bob's tricks, and of the whirl and his
scheme to overcome it; and she agreed that horses had to be handled
with a certain rational severity, no matter how much one loved them.
There was her Mab, which she had for eight years and which she had had
break of stall-kicking. The process had been painful for Mab, but it
had cured her.
"You've ridden a lot," Daylight said.
"I really can't remember the first time I was on a horse," she told
him. "I was born on a ranch, you know, and they couldn't keep me away
from the horses. I must have been born with the love for them. I had
my first pony, all my own, when I was six. When I was eight I knew what
it was to be all day in the saddle along with Daddy. By the time I was
eleven he was taking me on my first deer hunts. I'd be lost without a
horse. I hate indoors, and without Mab here I suppose I'd have been
sick and dead long ago."
"You like the country?" he queried, at the same moment catching his
first glimpse of a light in her eyes other than gray. "As much as I
detest the city," she answered. "But a woman can't earn a living in
the country. So I make the best of it--along with Mab."
And thereat she told him more of her ranch life in the days before her
father died. And Daylight was hugely pleased with himself. They were
getting acquainted. The conversation had not lagged in the full half
hour they had been together.
"We come pretty close from the same part of the country," he said. "I
was raised in Eastern Oregon, and that's none so far from Siskiyou."
The next moment he could have bitten out his tongue for her quick
question was:--
"How did you know I came from Siskiyou? I'm sure I never mentioned it."
"I don't know," he floundered temporarily. "I heard somewhere that you
were from thereabouts."
Wolf, sliding up at that moment, sleek-footed and like a shadow, caused
her horse to shy and passed the awkwardness off, for they talked
Alaskan dogs until the conversation drifted back to horses. And horses
it was, all up the grade and down the other side.
When she talked, he listened and followed her, and yet all the while he
was following his own thoughts and impressions as well. It was a nervy
thing for her to do, this riding astride, and he didn't know, after
all, whether he liked it or not. His ideas of women were prone to be
old-fashioned; they were the ones he had imbibed in the early-day,
frontier life of his youth, when no woman was seen on anything but a
side-saddle. He had grown up to the tacit fiction that women on
horseback were not bipeds. It came to him with a shock, this sight of
her so manlike in her saddle. But he had to confess that the sight
looked good to him just then.
Two other immediate things about her struck him. First, there were the
golden spots in her eyes. Queer that he had never noticed them before.
Perhaps the light in the office had not been right, and perhaps they
came and went. No; they were glows of color--a sort of diffused,
golden light. Nor was it golden, either, but it was nearer that than
any color he knew. It certainly was not any shade of yellow. A
lover's thoughts are ever colored, and it is to be doubted if any one
else in the world would have called Dede's eyes golden. But Daylight's
mood verged on the tender and melting, and he preferred to think of
them as golden, and therefore they were golden.
And then she was so natural. He had been prepared to find her a most
difficult young woman to get acquainted with. Yet here it was proving
so simple. There was nothing highfalutin about her company manners--it
was by this homely phrase that he differentiated this Dede on horseback
from the Dede with the office manners whom he had always known. And
yet, while he was delighted with the smoothness with which everything
was going, and with the fact that they had found plenty to talk about,
he was aware of an irk under it all. After all, this talk was empty
and idle. He was a man of action, and he wanted her, Dede Mason, the
woman; he wanted her to love him and to be loved by him; and he wanted
all this glorious consummation then and there. Used to forcing issues
used to gripping men and things and bending them to his will, he felt,
now, the same compulsive prod of mastery. He wanted to tell her that he
loved her and that there was nothing else for her to do but marry him.
And yet he did not obey the prod. Women were fluttery creatures, and
here mere mastery would prove a bungle. He remembered all his hunting
guile, the long patience of shooting meat in famine when a hit or a
miss meant life or death. Truly, though this girl did not yet mean
quite that, nevertheless she meant much to him--more, now, than ever,
as he rode beside her, glancing at her as often as he dared, she in her
corduroy riding-habit, so bravely manlike, yet so essentially and
revealingly woman, smiling, laughing, talking, her eyes sparkling, the
flush of a day of sun and summer breeze warm in her cheeks.