The Fighting Shepherdess Part 43

"But isn't it dangerous?" Mrs. Rathburn protested.

"Not unless he's mistook for one of the Outfit, then they might try a chunk of lead on him," Teeters rea.s.sured her.

Miss Rathburn, having recovered her poise together with her drawl, was regarding the high l.u.s.ter on her nails when Disston came up on the porch before leaving.

"I am sorry I was rude, Beth," he said earnestly.

"Were you?" indifferently. "I hadn't noticed it."

"I did a contemptible thing to that girl once," he continued, "and I feel that the least I can do to make amends is to refuse to allow her to be spoken of slightingly in my presence."

"Quite right, Hughie. You are a credit to our southern chivalry." Miss Rathburn suppressed a yawn with the tips of her pink tapering fingers.

"When I come back," he spoke propitiatingly, "the day after to-morrow, probably we'll go and see that petrified tree of which Teeters told us."

"A lovely bribe," languidly, "but don't hurry, for mother and I are leaving to-morrow."

"You mean that?"

"Certainly."

"I won't believe it."

"You always were incredulous, Hughie."

"I don't suppose I can convince you that I am very fond of you, and that I shall feel badly if you leave like this?"

This was more like it:--Miss Rathburn lowered her beautiful lashes.

"You haven't tried, have you?" she asked softly.

She looked very desirable at the moment--pink and white and soft and fluffy--all that the traditions of his family demanded in a woman. He knew perfectly what was expected of him, and there was every reason why he should ask her to marry him, and none at all why he should not, yet somehow when he opened his lips to ask, "Will you let me?" the words choked him. He said, instead, with the utmost cordiality:

"Don't you dare do anything so unfriendly as to leave without saying good-bye to me. Will you promise to wait until I return?"

If she had obeyed her impulse she would have shrieked at him:

"No! no! no! Not a minute, if you go to see that woman!" She would have liked to make him choose between them, but she dared not put him to the test for fear that she would place herself in a position from which her pride would not allow her to recede.

Beth wept in chagrin and rage while Disston rode away buoyantly, marvelling at his own light-heartedness, tingling with the old-time eagerness which used to come to him the moment he was in the saddle with his horse's head turned toward Bitter Creek.

He had stubbornly fought his desire to visit Kate again. What was the use, he demanded of himself sternly. She did not want to see him and virtually had said so. She had changed radically; she cared only for her sheep--even Teeters admitted that much. Anything beyond a warm friends.h.i.+p between them was, of course, impossible. She was not of his world, she did not "belong," and had no desire to. She could no more preside at a dinner table or pour tea gracefully, as would be expected of his wife, than Beth could shear a sheep or earmark one.

These things and many others he had told himself a thousand times to stop the longing he had to saddle his horse and go to her. What a weakling he was, he thought contemptuously, that he could not put her out of his mind and do the obviously right and proper thing by asking Beth to marry him, and so end forever this disquieting conflict within him--a conflict that had not been in his calculations when he had planned a happy summer.

It was physical attraction, he argued, together with the interest aroused by her unusual personality, which drew him to Kate--a pa.s.sing fancy, a curious, inexplicable infatuation; but, he a.s.sured himself stoutly, not at all the foundation upon which to build for permanency.

Yet as he rode towards the mountains with his eyes fixed upon the low pa.s.s to which Teeters had directed him, he experienced the first real thrill of carefree happiness that had come to him since his arrival.

The trail was a long and a hard one. His horse lost a shoe and limped badly, so, as the day waned, he walked frequently to spare the animal.

He was tired, but too eager to be conscious of it. He wondered what she would be doing when he found her, and whether he could surprise something like the old-time welcome from her. How her eyes used to sparkle when he rode up to her! He smiled to himself as he recalled her smile--frank, beaming, her face radiant with undisguised pleasure.

Kate was sitting on a rock on the backbone of a ridge when he drew in sight of her--a dark picturesque silhouette against the sky. The sheep fed below, and her horse, with a bedroll across its back, nibbled not far away.

Hugh stopped and looked at the lonely figure sitting motionless in the opaline-tinted light of the sunset, her chin sunk in her palm, her shoulders drooping. The tears rose to the man's eyes unexpectedly. It was not right, such solitude for a woman, he told himself vehemently.

It was singular, too, he reflected, how the mere sight of her revitalized him. Life took on a sudden interest, a zest that it never had elsewhere. He supposed it was because she was herself so vital. A feeling of exultation now swept over him--he forgot his fatigue, that he was hungry, and was conscious only of the fact that he was going to be near her, to talk to her uninterruptedly--for hours, maybe. After that he would go back content, ask Beth to marry him, and recover from this fever, this unreasoning, uncontrollable longing to see Kate again, which made him weak to imbecility.

Thinking her own thoughts, Kate stared at the ground, or at the sheep feeding quietly below her. Her rifle leaned against the rock upon which she was sitting. Occasionally she searched the juniper-covered sides of an adjacent mountain where an enemy could find convenient hiding, but mostly she sat looking at the ground at her feet.

She had taken over the valuable buck herd in the face of Bowers's protest, and was the first to graze on the top of the mountain, though the other bands were now also close to the summit. If more trouble was coming, it would very likely come quickly. They were fighters, these Rambouillets, she was thinking as she looked at them absently, and recalled an instance where a herd of them had battered a full-grown coyote to a jelly. They had surrounded him and by bunting him in the ribs, back and forth between them like a football, had stopped only when there was not a whole bone left in his carca.s.s. However, she reflected, the coyotes were mostly puppies yapping at the entrance of their den at this time of year, and the last wolf had been cleaned out of the mountains, so there really was not much danger from any source save these human enemies.

But even a fighting Rambouillet was not proof against a 30-30.

Instinctively her eyes swept the surrounding country for some unfamiliar moving object. Well, that was what she was there for--to protect them.

She did not expect any quarter because she was a woman--or intend to give any. She meant to shoot to kill, if she had the opportunity.

It was in this survey that Kate saw Disston and recognized him instantly. She had a notion that even if her eyesight had failed her, her heart would have told her, for it jumped as if she had been badly frightened. She felt dizzy for a moment after she verified her first look--the world swam, as though she had been blinded. If she had followed her impulse, she would have held out her arms and ran to meet him crying, "Hughie! Hughie!" But her impulses, she remembered in time, always came back like boomerangs to hurt her, if she followed them, so, instead, she endeavored to pull herself together by recalling that he had been six weeks at Teeters' without coming to see her but the one time when he had brought that girl to laugh at her. Why had he come now, she wondered.

Kate's pride had come to be her strongest ally and she summoned it all in this emergency, so when Disston climbed to her, finally, leading his limping horse, she was awaiting him calmly, her enigmatic smile upon her face, which was but a shade paler than usual. Her composure chilled and disappointed him; he could not know that she had clasped her hands tightly about her knee to hide their trembling.

"I wanted to surprise you," he said regretfully.

"You have."

"You don't show it."

"Then I'm improving."

"I liked you as you were, Kate--warm-hearted, impulsive." He dropped the bridle reins and sat down beside her.

"That got me nothing," she replied curtly.

A shadow crossed his face.

"And you don't care for anything that doesn't get you something?"

"Absolutely not."

"That doesn't sound like you," he said after a silence.

"I'm not 'me' any longer," she responded. "I made myself over to suit my environment. I get along better."

"What has changed you so much, Kate--what in particular?"

She hesitated a moment, then answered coldly:

"Nothing in particular--everything."

"You mean you don't want to tell me?"