"I think you'd better put back," Currie broke in. "McCartney's got somethin' movin'. Old Silent's in town—been there for three days now—probably livin' at Cheney's. The girl went up but came back this morning without him. I don't know what's doin', but Gabe says Bill's got some of Cheney's firewater an' there's goin' to be trouble. Gabe was wishin' to-day you'd come along. He expected you back when the girl came and when you didn't turn up he was worried. He says the girl's worried too."
They walked some distance before King made any comment. At last he turned off in the direction of the corral where he had put his horse for the night.
"I guess I'll be gettin' along back," he said quietly.
Lush Currie stood and watched him until he had vanished in the darkness. And even as he stood there, the rain that had been threatening all day began to fall slowly.
CHAPTER NINE
Cherry McBain stood in the open doorway of the cabin and looked out at the heavy grey skies and the gathering darkness. The air carried a chill reminder that summer was coming very rapidly to a close. All day long there had been a cold wind and scudding clouds that drifted low about the hill tops, and hurried before a fitful eastern breeze that carried dashes of mist and thin rain with it.
Now that evening had come the wind had gone down, but the drizzling rain was falling steadily and monotonously, as it does when it sets in for a long downpour. Though it was still early evening it was almost dusk, especially among the heavy-limbed tamaracs where the cabin stood. Cherry had lighted the lamp very early in an effort to bring some little cheer to the place, for the heavy unbroken gloom of the skies, now growing dark with the coming night, had filled her with a sense of loneliness from which she could not free herself.
It was not merely the fact that she was twenty-one and that the day had been a dull one, though perhaps a girl of Cherry McBain's temperament needs no other excuse for being melancholy. She was lonely, more indescribably lonely than she had ever been in her life before. The distance from happiness to despair is often a very short one indeed, and Cherry had gone from one to the other in what, to her, was an incredibly short time. The latter weeks of the summer just coming to a close had been the most supremely happy time of her life. But the last two or three days had been like long dreary months to her. It seemed as if she had been given but one short glimpse of bright hope only to be plunged again into deepest darkness. At first it was wounded pride that gave her pain. She loved King Howden—what hurt her most was the fact that she loved him still in spite of herself. Now that she recalled the way she had spoken to King, and then recalled what she had seen when she came unexpectedly upon Anne and King standing together in the deeper dusk of the doorway—she bit her lip and clenched her hands in anger at herself that she should have allowed herself to be such a fool.
It was this wounded pride of hers that had unsettled her so that she was unable to play her wonted part when she had finally tried to make her father come back to her. He had met her suggestion with a stormy outburst—worse than any he had ever brought upon her before—and she had broken miserably before it, and had left him and ridden back to the camp alone. What did it matter that she had walked up and down the crooked street of The Town for two days with as firm a step and as erect a bearing as ever? What did it matter that she had tossed her head proudly and passed Anne without so much as a word of recognition whenever the two met? What did it matter that she had ridden into camp with the same air of indifference that she had always carried? Others might not know—and she vowed they would not know—but she knew that she had suffered a double defeat, and it hurt.
But Cherry McBain was not one to forget her duty even in the hour of keenest disappointment. Her sense of defeat had been partly relieved during the day in the time-honored way that women have of relieving their feelings. Now as she stood in the doorway of her cabin and looked out at the grey world, she was the victim of a feeling that she had never really experienced before. She was afraid.