It invested her momentarily with a new quality, a new personality. She was no longer the Sheila McCrae he had known so well. She was the Spirit of the Land, a part of it—she was Sheila of the West; and her heritage was plain and mountain, gleaming lake and rushing river, its miles numbered by thousands, its acres by millions—a land for a new nation.
How many Sheilas, he wondered—young, strong, clean of blood, straight of limb—had ridden since the beginning of time into the new lands, and borne their part in peopling them. Fifty years before, her prototypes had ridden beside the line of crawling, creaking prairie schooners across the great plains toward the setting sun; little more than fifty years before that they had ridden down through the notches of the blue Alleghenies into the promised land of Kain-tuck-ee, the Dark and Bloody Ground, beside buckskin-clad, deckard-armed frontiersmen. Perhaps, centuries before that, her ancestresses had ridden with burly, skin-clad warriors out of the great forests of northern Europe down to the pleasant weaker south. But surely she was the peer of any of them—this woman riding knee to knee with him, the sloping sun in her clear, brown eyes, and the warm, sweet winds kissing her cheeks!
And so Casey Dunne dreamed as he rode—dreamed as he had not dreamed waking since the days when, a little boy, he had lain on warm sands beside a blue inland sea on summer's afternoons and watched the patched sails of the stone hookers, and the wheeling, gray lake gulls, and heard the water hiss and ripple to the long, white beaches. And, as he dreamed, a part of boyhood's joy in mere life awoke in him again.
Chakchak Ranch came into view. Its cultivated area smaller than that of Talapus, it was nevertheless as scrupulously cared for. The one might have served as model for the other. Here, also, were the straight lines of the ditches, the squares of grain fields beginning to show green, the young orchards, the sleek, contented stock, the corrals, and outbuildings.
But, as became the residence of a bachelor, the ranch-house itself was less pretentious. It was a small bungalow, with wide verandas which increased its apparent size. There Casey lived with Tom McHale, his right-hand man and foreman. The hired men, varying in number constantly, occupied other quarters.
Casey would have helped Sheila to alight, but she swung down, stretching her limbs frankly after the hard ride.
"That's going," she said. "Beaver Boy was a brute to hold; he wanted to race Shiner. He nearly got away from me once. My wrists are actually lame." She drew off her long buckskin gauntlets, flexing her wrists cautiously, straightening her fingers, prolonging the luxury of relaxing the cramped sinews.
"Let us now eat, drink, and be merry," said Casey, "for to-morrow—well, never mind that. But what would you like? Coffee, tea, claret lemonade? Tell me what you want."
"Too hot for tea. I'd like a dust eraser—a cold drink about a yard long."
"Hey, you, Feng!" Casey cried, to a white-aproned, grinning Chinaman, "you catch two ice drink quick—hiyu ice, you savvy! Catch claret wine, catch cracker, catch cake. Missy hiyu dry, hiyu hungry. Get a hustle on you, now!"