THE DEATH OF HAPPY JACK
When Bowles rode back to the Bat Wing Ranch he was a hard-looking citizen. His aunt, the hypothetical Mrs. Earl-Bowles, would scarcely have recognized him; Mrs. Lee started visibly at sight of his battered face; and Dixie smiled knowingly as she glanced at his half-closed eye.
"Aha, Mr. Man," she said, "it looks like you'd been into a juniper, too!"
"Well, something like that," acknowledged Bowles, gazing lover-like into her eyes; and from that he led the conversation into other channels, less intimately associated with common brawls. For though Bowles had given way to his evil passions and had even gone so far as to call for his gun in order to beard his rival, he did not wish it known to his lady. As he contemplated her grace in a plain white dress, and the witchery of her faintest smile, it seemed indeed a profanation of the sacred Temple of Love to so much as allude to a fight. Undoubtedly in the wooings of the stone age the males had competed with clubs, but certainly for no woman like this. Love, as Bowles had learned it from the poets, was above such sordid scenes; and as he had learned it from her—when she had chastened his soul with a kiss—ah, now he could sing with old Ben Jonson and the deathless Greeks:
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss within the cup,
And I'll not ask for wine."
Here was the shrine at which he worshiped, and he wished no carnal thought to enter in. So he spoke to her softly and went his way, lest some one should read his heart and break the spell with jeering.
The dust of a day's hard driving was on his face; there was a red weal over one eye and a bruise on his bearded cheek, but he was a lover still. Dixie knew it by his eyes, that glowed and kindled; by his voice, whose every word veiled a hidden caress; and she greeted the others coldly from thinking of this one who had come. Then she dissembled and went down among them, but her ways were changed and she only smiled at their jests.
"Hey, Dix," challenged Hardy Atkins at last, thrusting a grimy hand down into his shap pocket, "look what I got fer ye!"
He drew out a money-order ring that he had won in a mountain poker game, and flashed the stone in the sun.
"It's a genuwine, eighteen-carat diamond," he announced. "Come over hyer and let's see which finger it fits. If it fits yore third finger, you know——"