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BOOK TWO: The Estray

CHAPTER I

A WILD CAT

The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built
about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood
a well with a high rustic top, and about this well on a certain
brilliant July night, a tall man was strolling with his hands behind
his back. It was a night of full moon, sailing high, which poured
whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth
look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top
and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the
court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop
about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far
as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the
windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat,
active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This effect
was heightened by the fact that he never looked up. He was deep in
some plan to which it was impossible for her not to believe that the
curious pattern of his walk bore some relation.

From the northern wing of the ranch-house, strongly lighted, came a
tumult of sound; music, thumping feet, a man's voice chanting
couplets:

"Oh, you walk right through and you turn around
and swing the girl that finds you,
And you come right back by the same old track
and turn the girl behind you."

Some one was directing a quadrille in native fashion. There was much
laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the
man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been
a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily
near at hand.

A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and,
lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly
after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped.
This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his
weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.

"You, Mabel, don't you go home," she said.

She had not spoken loudly, but her voice beat against the walls of the
court as though it could have filled the whole moonlight night with
dangerous beauty. The listener outside lifted his head with a low,
startled exclamation. Suddenly the worl