She flushed suddenly, as she realized that she was quoting a saying of Gard’s.
“You keep Patsy here, won’t you?” she called as she rode away, leaving her father looking after her with an expression half proud, half wistful and wholly tender.
“She’s clean grown up,” said he, to himself, as he stooped and snapped the leash into Patsy’s collar.
“The bonnie thing! Lord! How I wish her mother was alive!”
He stood staring out upon the sun-washed desert, wide, silent, baffling, and spoke the yearning thought of his heart.
“I don’t know how to be a mother to her, and she’s sure going to need one. Lord, Lord!” He cast a comprehensive glance over the fierce, brilliant landscape. “This is an all-right country for men and burros,” he said, with a half-whimsical sigh, “but it’s a mighty hard one for women and horses!”
Helen had promised Jacinta to ride as far as Old Joe Papago’s, to see Mrs. Old Joe about a young Indian girl who was to come and help Jacinta with the work of the casa. Old Joe was better off, financially, than any other Papago in the section, and his wife, who was reputed to have some Spanish blood, exercised a sort of guardianship over the women and young girls of their settlement. This latter was only three or four miles distant, and there was a slight ting in the December air that quickened Dickens’ nerves, and made him ready for a frolic, but Helen was in no mood to gratify him. She ignored all his invitations to run, and kept him to the slow little walk of the bronco.
He hated it and fretted under the steady rein; but for once Helen did not heed him. She was going over in her mind the events of the past five days. Westcott, in the brief space of his hour with her, had sought to sow the seeds of doubt of Gard in her mind. He had spoken vaguely of certain tricky games that the stranger was trying to play upon him, and an imagination less pure than the girl’s might have inferred much from the subtle little that he let fall regarding Kate Hallard.
The carefully chosen seed, however, had found no favoring soil—no fostering care. Helen was herself of too true and sturdy a fiber to doubt the truth and the stability of Gard’s nature. She dismissed, with hardly a thought, the suggestion of trickery on his part, and the other poisoned arrows wholly missed their intended mark.
“There’s a lot of ways of thinking about any one thing,” Gard had said one day, as they talked out long, long thoughts of life, and right, “But a man—he’s got to follow the straightest path he sees; for he’s got to live so he can like himself, and care to be with himself.”