Ward nodded about a quarter of an inch, as if he agreed, and studied his mate with a slightly disgusted look. Then he shrewdly appraised the girl behind the gun. When he spoke again there was a little twinkle of admiration in his eye.
“Wildcat country’s right. Don’t blame you for hangin’ around this neck of the woods, Hampton. Don’t blame you a-tall. Well, so long. Bill!”
The last word crackled. Bill, still edging away from the gaping muzzles, obeyed Ward’s thumb-jerk along the road. Passing Douglas, he paused to glower hatefully into the slitted blue eyes watching him. Then he shuffled onward.
Not until they had rounded another turn did Douglas take his unswerving gaze from their backs. Then, as he relaxed, he realized that Ward had shown no suspicion over his sudden appearance; recalled, too, the twinkle and the parting remarks. The man had thought he and Marion had a tryst. Could he have looked back through the trees, however, and studied the girl, he would have begun to wonder.
Douglas, too, wondered as he looked at her. The snap of anger had vanished from her eyes, the flush from her cheeks, the girlishness from her figure. The gray orbs watching him now were cold as ice—ice with a smouldering flame far below its surface. Her face and her poise were as stony as any upright bowlder standing under Dickie Barre. From one hand hung his gun, its muzzles now buried in the sand. Straight, forbidding, she stood looking fixedly at him. And, though he was not expecting any thanks for what he had done, he stood staring blankly back at her. This was a girl whom he never had seen before.
“Well! What’s wrong?” he puzzled. “Seems to be a sudden frost.”
Unspeaking, she lifted the gun and held it toward him. He took it, peered at it as if seeking on it the cause of her hauteur, looked up and found her turning away. She took half a dozen steps toward the Wilham home, straight as an Indian, proud as a princess, before he moved. Then he began striding after her. At once she stopped.
“Thought you was goin’ the other way,” she said pointedly.
“Did you? Well, I’m going this way now.”
“I’d ruther you’d go on to where you started for.”