“I am glad you ride this way,” he said, indicating her military tree. “I thought I’d have to sit in one of those queer dishes ladies usually ride on.”
Helen laughed. “If I waited to have horses gentled to the side-saddle,” she answered, “I should never get anything to ride. It’s the only way, here in the desert, and Father always thought it was the safer way.”
She was walking beside the pony, her broad-brimmed felt hat pushed back, that she might look up at her guest. “I used a side-saddle back east,” she added.
“I think this way is a lot better,” Gard replied. He wished she would look up again. It seemed to him that his eyes had never beheld anything more delicious than her upturned face, with its background of broad hat-brim.
He could only glimpse it when she looked straight ahead, as she was doing now. Her nose had a little tilt, that made him think her always just about to look up, and kept him in a pleasant state of expectation. He could not see her mouth and chin without leaning forward, and he shrank, shyly, from doing that, but he studied the firm brown cheek, where just a touch of deep color came and went, and the neat sweep of fair hair back into the shadow of the broad hat, and he had noted when she looked up that her eyes were gray, looking out friendly-wise under level brows.
“You were a mighty plucky little girl to tackle that rattler,” he said, with a sudden realization of her courage. Her short riding-habit misled him and he did not think of her as grown up.
Helen stiffened, resentful of what seemed like a too familiar address. Then she recognized his mistake, with a curious little sense of pleasure in it.
“That was nothing,” she answered, with a lighthearted laugh, “Sandy Larch taught me the trick. I played that way with more than one rattler when”—“when I was a child,” she had been about to say, but she changed it, and added, “before I went away to school.” “No use dragging in ‘college’” she told herself. “He might think I was trying to seem important.”
“I know Sandy Larch,” Gard said. “He’s a good man.”
“So are you,” was the thought that flashed through the girl’s mind as she glanced upward again. She dismissed it instantly, with a feeling of astonishment at herself. She was not given to speculate in such wise on the quality of chance acquaintances.