“Of course. Now, don't let's quarrel about that till we come to it. I have a good idea of my own, I think, for the first story. A man comes out here and disappears, you know, and after a while his sister comes to find him. She gets into all kinds of trouble—is kidnapped by a gang of robbers, and kept in a cave. When the leader of the gang comes back—he has been away on some depredation—you see, I have only the bare outline of the story yet—and, well, it's her brother! He kills the one who kidnapped her, and she reforms him. Of course, there ought to be some love interest. I think, perhaps, one member of the gang ought to fall in love with her, don't you know? And after a while he wins her—”
“She'll reform him, too, I reckon.”
“Oh, yes. She couldn't love a man she couldn't respect—no woman could.”
“Oh!” Kent took a minute to apply that personally. It was of value to him, because it was an indication of Val's own code. “Maybe,” he suggested tentatively, “she'd get busy and reform the whole bunch.”
“Oh, say—that would be great! She's an awfully sweet little thing—perfectly lovely, you know—and they'd all be in love with her, so it wouldn't be improbable. Don't you remember, Kent, you told me once that a man would do anything for a woman, if he cared enough for her?”
“Sure. He would, too.” Kent fought back a momentary temptation to prove the truth of it by his own acquiescence in this pal business. He was saved from disaster by a suspicion that Val would not be able to see it from his point of view, and by the fact that he would much rather be pals than nothing.
She would have gone on, talking and planning and discussing, indefinitely. But the sun slid lower and lower, and Kent was not his own master. The time came when he had to go, regardless of his own wishes, or hers.
When he came again, the story was finished, and Val was waiting, with extreme impatience, to read it to him and hear his opinion before she sent it away. Kent was not so impatient to hear it, but he did not tell her so. He had not seen her for a month, and he wanted to talk; not about anything in particular—just talk about little things, and see her eyes light up once in a while, and her lips purse primly when he said something daring, and maybe have her play something on the violin, while he smoked and watched her slim wrist bend and rise and fall with the movement of the bow. He could imagine no single thing more fascinating than that—that, and the way she cuddled the violin under her chin, in the hollow of her neck.
But Val would not play—she had been too busy to practice, all spring and summer; she scarcely ever touched the violin, she said. And she did not want to talk—or if she did, it was plain that she had only one theme. So Kent, perforce, listened to the story. Afterward, he assured her that it was “outa sight.” As a matter of fact, half the time he had not heard a word of what she was reading; he had been too busy just looking at her and being glad he was there. He had, however, a dim impression that it was a story with people in it whom one does not try to imagine as ever being alive, and with a West which, beyond its evident scarcity of inhabitants, was not the West he knew anything about. One paragraph of description had caught his attention, because it seemed a fairly accurate picture of the bench land which surrounded Cold Spring Coulee; but it had not seemed to have anything to do with the story itself. Of course, it must be good—Val wrote it. He began to admire her intensely, quite apart from his own personal subjugation.
Val was pleased with his praise. For two solid hours she talked of nothing but that story, and she gave him some fresh chocolate cake and a pitcher of lemonade, and urged him to come again in about three weeks, when she expected to hear from the magazine she thought would be glad to take the story; the one whose editor had suggested that she write of the West.