In all his days he had seen no woman like her; and when she had come toward him in Lamo, with Higgins close behind her, he had been so astonished that he had momentarily forgotten Deveny and all the rest of them.
Women of the kind he had met had never affected him as Barbara had affected him. He had still a mental picture of her as she had come toward him, with her hair flying in a golden-brown mass over her shoulders; her wide, fear-lighted eyes seeking his with an expression of appeal so eloquent that it had sent a queer, thrilling, protective sensation over him.
And as she rode ahead of him it was the picture she had made then that he saw; and the emotions that assailed him were the identical emotions that had beset him when for a brief instant, in Lamo, he had held her in his arms, with her head resting on his shoulder.
That, he felt, had been the real Barbara Morgan. Her manner now—the constrained and distant pose she had adopted, her suspicions, her indignation—all those were outward manifestations of the reaction that had seized her. The real Barbara Morgan was she who had run to him for protection and she would always be to him as she had appeared then—a soft, yielding, trembling girl who, at a glance had trusted him enough to run straight into his arms.
CHAPTER IX
AN UNWELCOME GUEST
It was late afternoon when Barbara and Harlan—the girl still riding a little in advance of the man—rode their horses out of a stretch of broken country featured by low, barren hills and ragged draws, and came to the edge of a vast level of sage and mesquite that stretched southward an interminable distance.
The sun was low—a flaming red disk that swam in a sea of ever-changing color between the towering peaks of two mighty mountains miles westward—and the sky above the big level upon which Barbara and Harlan rode was a pale amethyst set in the dull gray frame of the dusk that was rising from the southern and eastern horizons.