“So long, Sandy!” she cried, over her shoulder. “I’ll do my best.”
“Good luck to you!” Sandy waved his big cowboy hat.
“Kate’ll fetch it I reckon,” he muttered, turning toward the sheds. “But now who’d a’ thunk we’d a’ fixed it up that a’way? Gosh-hemlock! What funny things you see when you ain’t got a gun!”
Kate Hallard, meantime, was thinking of many things as she rode back to Sylvania. The tide of old memories was at flood as she thought of the man whom she was going to see in Gard’s behalf. She had spoken truly when she told Sandy Larch she had once known the Governor well. How well, was a matter that lay deep in her heart, a part of her hard, sordid, unprotected girlhood, dead and buried now these thousand years, it seemed to her. Something within her that she had thought was dead with it shrank from the encounter of the morrow, but cowardice was not one of the woman’s weaknesses. She set her shoulders squarely at the memory of what Gard was braving for her.
“They’s one thing sure,” she said, half aloud. “Dave’ll do anything can be done. I reckon I can bank on that. He wa’ n’t a bad sort in the old days.”
The road ran along the edge of an ancient lake, now a sea of sand, and for many years, in the new order, the great rodeo ground of the region. The entrance was yet marked by two big posts, one of which bore a great yellow-and-black poster, such as the Salvation Army puts up through the desert wastes, seeking to turn the plainsman’s thoughts to higher things.
Beneath the poster, on the sand, a bull-snake and a burrowing owl fraternized comfortably at the mouth of the hole that was their common dwelling. Above it a carrion crow perched, cawing dismally at the scene. The poster itself was sun-bleached and weather-worn, peppered with the bullets of passing cowboys who had taken jocular shots at it, and beaten by the blown desert-sand, but still legible. Kate Hallard had seen many of its kind; had passed this very one on her way out that morning. She glanced at it now.
“FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY-BEGOTTEN SON, THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH ON HIM SHOULD NOT PERISH—” The rest was obliterated.
In her softened mood the words held her attention as they had never before done. She checked her horse to read them again.
“I d’ know much about it,” she murmured. “The desert’s always been a mighty handy place fer perishin’; if they was a God, now, an’ He was int’rested enough to give us a few more folks like this here Gabriel Gard, I guess mebby believin’ ’d come handier, too.”