The blows ceased. Joshua gave his drill a twist and looked up at two mounted figures. One was the walker on his big roan mare, and the other was a girl on a black gelding. She wore a flannel shirt open at the neck and riding breeches. From under a man’s broad-brimmed hat her large eyes, brown as Oriental topaz, looked straight at Joshua. Her hair was frizzly and bronze-gold where the sunbeams caught it.
“Lady wants to see you, Cole,” said the walker. “Let Bluenose turn the drill awhile.”
As a little girl Madge Mundy had been outstanding. Her adorably recalcitrant hair, with its strange gleam of reddish gold, combined with the blended brown-pink coloring of her flawless skin had made her so. Now, a young woman rounding to maturity, she would have attracted instant attention among a hundred girls, all beautiful. Her beauty was unique, her own, and altogether distracting to mankind because of its unexpectedness. That amazing, crinkly hair was now gathered simply at the nape of her neck and held in place by a ribbon, and below the ribbon it spread fanwise over her back and shoulders, a gleaming, puffy mass of antique gold. But her eyes, as of old, held the steadfast gaze of the discomfited hammerman. Their reddish-brown was like the brown of no other eyes that he had ever seen. The whimsical thought flashed through his mind that Madge, like the untarnished forests and mountains all about her, had been newly pumiced and varnished in honor of his coming.
“Well, Joshua, aren’t you coming to say hello to me?”
Slowly he rose from his seat on a powder can and walked toward the horses. The walking boss and Joshua’s fellow-hammermen were watching him narrowly, and his throat felt dry and parched. He put out his hand as he reached the side of the black horse, and looked up at her with his grave gray-blue eyes.
“Hello,” he said obediently.
The walker snorted, and the girl’s laughter rang out with a clearness that somehow seemed to match her eyes and her skin and her even little teeth. If she had laughed any other way, thought Joshua, the entire effect of her individuality would have been set at naught.
“How did—California Bill told you I was here, of course.”
“Yes, Bill tells me everything. I have him hypnotized.”
He had taken her strong brown hand and held it until it occurred to him to pump her arm up and down and release his hold, which he did with boyish vigor.