“Say no more about it, please!” protested Smythe. “I’d rather make you laugh than weep––assuming that anybody would weep for me.”
“Oh, I’d have felt very badly if you’d been hurt,” Marion assured him. “And you might have been, too.”
“No, a cropper like that’s nothing. Peanuts isn’t––” He paused just a second to look into Marion’s eyes with an expression that arrested her attention sharply. “Peanuts isn’t Sunnysides.”
“Sunnysides?” she cried out unguardedly.
Smythe’s eyes warned her, as he waited to give her time for self-control. He did not know how far Hillyer was in her confidence.
“Is there news––about––Sunnysides?” she faltered, struggling desperately with herself.
“Yes,” he answered. Then he continued slowly, in as light a manner as possible, the while he held her with a concentrated gaze: “I’d been down the valley as far as the mouth of the canyon. Coming back, about two miles below where Haig’s road joins this, I saw the sorrels in a cloud of dust. ‘Hello!’ I said. ‘Something’s up, or the sorrels wouldn’t be driven like that.’ In a minute or two I made out Bill Craven, one of Haig’s 148 men, leaning forward in the seat of a road wagon, and laying on the whip. ‘If Haig saw that!’ I thought. And so I––”
“Go on, please!” said Marion shrilly.
But Smythe was purposely deliberate; for he saw Hillyer looking at her curiously.
“I wasn’t going to let anybody abuse his horses if I could prevent it. Besides, how did I know but Craven was stealing the sorrels? I threw my pony straight across the road. Craven reined the sorrels up on their hind legs, almost on top of me.