Mr. Masterson from the saddle held out his hand; Ruth Pemberton took it and, making a step of the stirrup which he tendered, sprang to the pillion.
“You can hold on by my belt,” quoth Mr. Masterson.
And so they came back to the ’Dobe Walls; Ruth Pemberton’s arms about Mr. Masterson, her cheek against his shoulder, while her soul wandered up and down in a world of strange happinesses, as one might walk among trees and flowers, with birds singing overhead.
Four days; and the buckboard bearing Ruth Pemberton, Madam Pemberton and Count Banti drew away for the North. A lieutenant with ten cavalrymen, going from Fort Elliot to Dodge, accompanied them by way of escort.
“And so you hate the East?” Ruth Pemberton had asked Mr. Masterson that morning before the start, her eyes dim, and her cheeks much too pale for so innocent a question.
“No, not hate,” returned Mr. Masterson, “but my life is in the West.”
As the buckboard reached the ridge from which would come the last glimpse of the Canadian, off to the south and west, outlined against the sky, stood a pony and rider. The rider waved his sombrero in farewell. Ruth Pemberton gazed and still gazed; the hunger of the brown eyes was as though her love lay starving. The trail sloped sharply downward, and the picture of the statue horseman on the hill was snatched away. With that—her life turned drab and desolate—Ruth Pemberton slipped to the floor of the buckboard, and buried her face in her mother’s kindly lap.
[CHAPTER II—THAT TRANSACTION IN PONIES]
Aunt Nettie Dawson, because of her tenderness of heart and the hard acridities of her tongue, had made for herself a place in the popular esteem. The well-to-do and healthy feared her for her sarcasms, while upon the sick she descended in the guise of an unmixed blessing. Those who mourned, and by whose hearths sat trouble, found in her the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
Cimarron Bill was the personal nephew of Aunt Nettie, the other inhabitants of Dodge being nephews and nieces by brevet, and it was to Cimarron Bill that Mr. Masterson was indebted for the advantage of Aunt Nettie’s acquaintance.