“Just his kind of figure. And he'd be saying further it was time Sandy Cass took to the woods.”
He had an irritating spasm of desire to touch the slim white fingers on the gate. Gracia moved her hands nervously. Sandy saw the fingers tremble, and swore at himself under his breath.
“Why, Saint George?”
“Thinking he was a wildcat and he'd make a yel—a—Maybe thinking he didn't look nat—I mean,” Sandy ended very lamely, “the Kid'd probably use figures of speech and mean something that'd occur to him by and by.”
“You're not well yet. You're not going so soon,” she said, speaking quite low.
Sandy meditated a number of lies, and concluded that he did not care for any of them. He seemed to dislike them as a class.
This kind of internal struggle was new and irritating. He had never known two desires that would not compromise equably, or one of them recognize its place and get out of the road. The savage restlessness in his blood, old, well-known, expected, something in brain and bone, had always carried its point and always would. He accounted for all things in all men by reference to it, supposing them to feel restless, the inner reason why a man did anything. But here now was another thing, hopelessly fighting it, clinging, exasperating; somewhere within him it was a kind of solemn-eyed sorrow that looked outward and backward over his life, and behold, the same was a windy alkali desert that bore nothing and was bitter in the mouth; and at the ends of his fingers it came to a keen point, a desire to touch Gracia's hair and the slim fingers on the gate.
Gracia looked up and then away.
“You're not well yet.”
“You've been uncommonly good to me, and all—”