“I’m going on the warpath, but not the way you mean,” Rock answered. “I am not going after anybody with a gun in my hand and blood in my eye. Not yet. Listen! Let me whisper something in your ear.”
Nona stood beside Sangre, one hand resting on the red horse’s curved neck. Rock bent down as if to whisper. And when Nona turned her face up, he kissed her lightly on the red mouth that was beginning to haunt him and to trouble him wherever he went, very much to his dismay.
And when she drew back with startled eyes, Rock touched his horse gently and rode away without a backward glance. If he looked back, he would turn back, whether to apologize or plead, he could scarcely say. For a young man who had always been rather egotistically sure of himself he found his breast filled with a strange commotion.
“That,” he sighed at last, with a backward look into the Marias Valley from the south bank, “is sure a hell of a way for a fellow to treat a girl that got up at daybreak to get him his breakfast. Well, I guess it’s either kill or cure.”
As the sun rose, a hot ball in the east, flinging its careless gold over the bleached grass, that rolled away to limitless horizons, and Rock gradually left that familiar, pleasant valley far behind, he thought less and less of that unpremeditated kiss and more and more of the business in hand. He had set out on what seemed a mad undertaking, but there was method in his madness.
He came down to the bed of the Missouri and into the streets of Fort Benton shortly after noon. He let his horses rest and munch hay in a livery stable for three hours. Then, with a little food tied on his pack, he embarked on the ferry and so gained the southern shore, whence ran the great freight trails to the Judith Basin and farther to towns along the Yellowstone, threaded like forlorn beads on that steel string which was the Northern Pacific Railway.
His specific destination was Billings, two hundred miles in an air line southeast. But first he turned aside into the rich grazing lands of the Judith Basin to find Al Kerr of the Capital K. It was a far cry to the Odeon and Clark’s Ford on the bleak plains of Nebraska. But Rock was riding into the Judith to draw on a promise the little man had made him that night under the stars.
He forged southeast all that afternoon, picketed his horses overnight by a rippling creek, wiped the dew off his saddle at dawn, and rode again—rode at a jog trot, hour after hour. He met a stage and held converse with the driver, passed on and came to a stage station on that rutted artery of travel to Lewistown. Here a hostler gave him specific directions. And at sunset he rode into the home ranch of the Capital K. The first man that hailed him was Kerr himself.
“Well, well, well,” Kerr said. “You have shore been a long time gettin’ around to pay a sociable call.”