Mary Hope was punished for her lie. She had not promised that dance, and so she sat on the 155 plank bench and saw Lance and Jennie Miller sway past her four times before a gawky youth who worked for her father caught sight of her and came over from the water-bucket corner to ask her for the dance. That was not the worst. On the fourth round of Lance and Jennie, and just as the gawky one was bowing stiffly before her, Lance looked at her over Jennie Miller’s shoulder, and smiled that tantalizing, Lorrigan smile that always left her uneasily doubtful of its meaning.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A WAY HE HAD WITH HIM
It was at the chuck-wagon at midnight, while Riley and Sam Pretty Cow were serving tin cups of black coffee to a shuffling, too-hilarious crowd, that Lance next approached Mary Hope. She was standing on the outskirts of a group composed mostly of women, quite alone so far as cavaliers were concerned, for the gawky youth had gone after coffee. She was looking toward the sagebrush camp-fire around which a crowd of men had gathered with much horseplay at which they were laughing loudly, and she was wondering how best she could make Lance Lorrigan aware of her absolute indifference to him, when his voice drawled disconcertingly close to her ear:
“You’re not lonely now, you girl––and you did find a secret at Cottonwood Spring. A pleasant little secret, wasn’t it?”
Mary Hope’s hands became fists at her side, held close against her best frock. “I think the fellows over by the fire have discovered your pleasant secret,” she said, and did not turn her face toward him.
With his arms folded and his eyebrows pulled together and his lip between his teeth, Lance stared down at her face, studying it in the flicker of the distant firelight and the two lanterns. If her combativeness roused in him any resentment, he did not permit it to show in his voice.