Women had never been a concern of King Howden's. He had never been able to quite understand their ways, and he had come to the conclusion that if success in life depended upon a man's ability to succeed with women—and he had known many who had advanced such a theory in all seriousness—-then nothing in the world was more inevitable than that he should fail, and fail miserably, sooner or later. He had avoided women generally, and for years had deliberately sought for conditions of living in which he could reasonably hope for a chance to make good without them.
But here was a woman no man could avoid. In one slow glance again he noted the lightning that played in her dark eyes; he caught the wild witchery of her tumbled hair and the beauty of her cheeks, flushed from the excitement of the fight she had just won, and he lost himself in contemplation of the smile that lent an indescribable sweetness to her firm mouth. She was dressed plainly—even roughly—in a waist that revealed the soft whiteness of her neck and throat and the firm round curve of her shoulders and breast, and in a skirt that clung closely to her limbs. But of these things King Howden was only vaguely conscious. He could not take his eyes from her face, with its strange contradiction of flashing eyes and gently smiling mouth.
The girl was the first to speak.
"You must have been riding hard," she said. "I thought I'd never catch up with you."
"Catch up?" King thought to himself, and was at a loss to understand.
"Come on," she said quickly, and before he was able to reply, "I'm going to ride a little way with you."
She drew her rein back, pulled her horse about, touched him lightly on the flank with her quirt, and was off at an easy canter along the trail, leaving King to follow or not as he pleased. With a slow smile of recognition of the somewhat anomalous position he was in, he turned into the trail and rode after her.
When he came up with her he drew his horse in a little and together they rode for the next half hour through little valleys and over gently rounding hills dimly outlined in the failing twilight.
Here and there a rabbit started up in the trail before them and ran its foolish frightened race ahead of them until the dog came and put it to cover in the low underbrush beside the roadway. Occasionally a partridge or a prairie chicken got up suddenly from its dust bath in the middle of the trail and hurried off with much clucking and beating of the wings. Once a coyote stood with pricked ears before them on the trail until the sight of Sal sent him off with a lazy, half defiant lope to a little knoll, where he perched himself and waited while they rode past. They caught the delicate aroma of dew on the grass, and brushed a warm fragrance from the foliage as they swept close to where the trees leaned a little over the trail. Frequently they splashed through little hurrying streams where the cold water ran only a few inches deep, or rode through low meadows where the mist lay like white shrouds and settled lightly above the long grass that carpeted the hollows. And behind them the sky had deepened to a blood-red hue with long ribbons of pale gold stretching along the horizon already far to the north of where the sun had gone down.
They had rounded the brow of a hill and had come out of cover to a point in the trail where it afforded them a wide outlook across a meadowy valley. The girl brought her horse to a stand and King reined in beside her.