ow I can't put it off any
longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going
East in the morning."
"You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her
own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through
the clouds.
"Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride."
Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from
worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he
had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much
longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard
over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard
the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over
and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.
"Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a
compass. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of
monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false
note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke
into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of
the ponies in the sand.
"That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about
anything."
Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which
had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out
to the pass. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the
door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices.
"That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a
bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political
influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return
from the pass."
She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he
should accept.
"Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had
dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.
She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his
tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could
look in on the group of idling male gossips.
"Don't!"
It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew
was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she
not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for
anyone coming in by the trai
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