When he had mounted into his saddle he turned and looked back along the street. In the dusky frame of the lodging-house doorway he could see Anne still standing where he had left her. She waved her hand to him as he looked back at her, and he waved in reply as he drew his horse's head about and took the trail that led westward to his cabin.
CHAPTER EIGHT
King Howden was at a loss to understand himself that night. Into a few short days had been crowded more emotion, more stirring experience than he had ever known before. The very fact that there had been nothing spectacular, nothing especially thrilling, in what had occurred only made the effects more far-reaching and real. A change had come over him that was the result of forces working so deeply within him that he knew life from this time forward was to mean something different, something more serious than it had ever meant to him.
When he arrived at his cabin, after putting his horse away for the night and making a few final preparations for an early start in the morning, he found his bunk strangely uninviting. His mind, was unusually busy turning over and over a host of thoughts that crowded upon one another in a confusion that made sleep impossible. He went to the doorway of his shack, and sitting on the doorstep drew his dog down beside him and tried to think himself clear of the confusion. He recalled the night he had learned of his brother's death—it seemed as if a year had gone since that night, instead of a week. His imagination dwelt upon Cherry McBain as she looked that night when she rode beside him on the trail. His heart bounded again as he saw her standing before him on the little bridge over the White Pine—and he felt again, as he had felt a hundred times since, the ecstasy of that moment when Cherry had asked him for his help against a man he already hated. He smiled at the recollection of his meeting with McCartney in Cheney's place. Then his heart froze as he thought of what had happened only within the last hour.
As he sat alone on the doorstep the night came down on the hills and the valley, but King had no thought of the passing hours. His mind was on the sudden appearance of Cherry McBain, like an apparition out of the dusk, and the coldly accusing note in her voice when she had spoken.
"She couldn't think—" he murmured to himself and then stopped.
He wondered that he had not gone off to find her—to follow her and explain it all. And then it occurred to him that words—his words particularly—were helpless things after all. Even if he had gone and found her, and spoken to her, what would his words have done? And yet—he clung fiercely to a hope—the hope that had so lately been born in him.
"She can't think I'm wrong," he went on. "She can't—I couldn't stand that. I've been trying—I'm not right all through, but I'm not wrong like that. She's got to believe me."
And then it came upon him—came with crystal clearness—that the heart of Cherry McBain could be won and held only by a man that was not afraid of himself, a man who had a task so great that it overshadowed petty problems and made them insignificant by comparison. And so King Howden renewed the covenant he had made with himself only a few days before, that his place in life was something more than the small circle drawn about his narrow existence, with its little weaknesses and discouragements and failures. Only this time the covenant was made sacred because a man's love for a woman had set its seal on it.
By the first streak of dawn King was already well along the trail. He wanted to reach the top of the hills by sunrise, and with a climb of some five or six miles before him he urged his horse forward at a good pace. From the low-lying levels of the grassy plain and the deep meadows, to the first rolling uplands he mounted while the dawn was still gray, and from the uplands to the hills and down through the valleys that lay between. The old trail had not been used much during the latter part of the summer owing to the steadily decreasing distance that now lay between the new settlement and the end of the steel. On either side and in the centre of the trail where ran the narrow ridge between the two tracks, the grass was high and drenched the horse's legs with dew.