“Precious lot you know about joy-riding and restaurant cashiers! You read that in some story.”
Joshua’s heart was filled with bitterness, but it did not show in his tolerant dark-gray eyes as he studied her averted face.
“Well, I can’t hold you,” he said at last. “When are you going?”
“To-morrow—on the stage.”
“Oh, to-morrow!”
“Yes. We—I hadn’t much chance to tell you before to-day.”
“No—not much”—from Joshua, absently. A space of silence, then: “Let’s let ’em out a little.”
As they galloped along knee to knee Joshua’s dullness continued to grow. Had Madge showed him the letter from Mary Montgomery, or told him of its contents earlier, he would not have suffered such forebodings. He had been to the post office with her on the foregoing mail day. She had read the letter before mounting the black for the ride back home. She had not even told him who the letter was from. He even would not have felt miserable over the fact that it was the Montgomerys who had invited her and that she was to be under the same roof with Jack down there, had she made the announcement in her usual buoyant way. But she had been secretive, and his were the pangs that the jealous lover suffers mutely.
They swung away from the road as it swept up to the little mining community of G-string. Piñon slopes, gentle at first, that followed one another in graduated scallops until they became a series of steep ridges, led the way to Spyglass Mountain. Over and about these the riders traced a course, traveling parallel to the route that they had come, but a mile inland from the lake. This was a round that they frequently made because of the diversity of the scenery offered. Here and there they crossed tiny hidden grassy spots, where only bunchgrass grew, unsuccored by any moisture save that which remained from the winter snows. Now they rode ridges and looked down cañons that were amazingly steep and grim, which sprawled eventually to the yellow desert nearly three-quarters of a mile below them. Sagebrush slopes, rubble slides, piñon groves, yucca-studded levels; an eminence where they paused their ponies and gazed for many minutes over an endless sweep of dark-green forest to the west; another summit which gave view of the mocking yellow desert stretching to the north and south, and bounded on the east by hazy pink buttes that seemed to float a quarter of their height above the earth; up and down, over rocky hills and into wedge-shaped cañons, until a steep slope before them became a flung-out apron that invited them to climb Spyglass Mountain, towering above its neighbor peaks—all this was offered them on that round by the Master of that untarnished land.
And as they reached the hem of the apron and looked up into the grim old lady’s face they saw a body of horsemen winding about among clumps of sage and rocky obstacles.