"Are they?" that lady commented. "Then I don't want to drive behind wild ones."
A light wind was in their faces, blowing the dust backward. The town vanished suddenly, lost behind swells of brown grasses. The road wound tortuously onward, skirting little groves of cottonwoods, swinging along gulches, sometimes plunging down them and ascending in long grades on the thither side.
Clyde drank in the sweet, thin air eagerly. The city and her everyday life seemed far behind. Heretofore her holidays had been passed in places where pleasure was a business. This was to be different. She would not look for amusement; she would let it come to her. She felt that she was entering a world of which she knew little, peopled by those whose outlook was strange. It seemed, somehow, that this journey was to be fateful—that she had placed herself in the grip of circumstances which moved her without volition. Where and how, she wondered vaguely, would it end?
She glanced at Dunne's profile, shaded by the hat brim tilted over his eyes against the sun; at his buckskin-gloved hands holding the reins against the steady pull of the big chestnuts; downward over the dashboard at their hoofs falling with the forceful impact of hammers and yet rising with the light springiness of an athlete's foot, throwing the miles behind them scornfully. And she was dreamily content.
"You're going to like it," said Dunne suddenly.
"Am I?" she smiled. "How do you know? How did you know?"
"It's largely a guess. I was nervous at first."
"And now?"
"No. This is a plain, dusty trail, the grass is so dry it's almost dead, the scenery is conspicuously absent, the smell of leather and horseflesh isn't especially pleasant—and yet you are not noticing these things. The bigness and the newness of the land have got you, Miss Burnaby. You don't know it and you can't put it into words—I can't myself—but the feeling is there. You are one of us at heart."
"Of 'us'?"