“Ah!” she gasped.
And thereupon she blushed, and looked furtively around her, as if she had been caught in some doubtful, if not discreditable, act. But there was no time for moral subtleties. She staggered––for her legs were stiff from inaction––to her pony, replaced her raincoat behind the saddle, mounted in hot haste, and rode down the steep hill toward the houses. At a little distance from them the road she traveled joined the other. There she turned abruptly, and followed the unfamiliar road until she was safely out of sight of any chance observer at the barn, and yet not so far from the trail she had just left but that she could return to it if, by any chance, he should come back that way.
Dismounting quickly at the chosen spot, she turned Tuesday until he stood squarely across the road. Then her nimble fingers flew at the cinches of the saddle.
“There now!” she exclaimed, hot with excitement and exertion.
She stepped back to view her handiwork, and laughed nervously. Next she drew a tiny mirror and a bit of chamois skin from her bosom, and swiftly removed some of the dust and moisture from her flushed face. Then her hair, always somewhat unruly, required a touch or two. That done, she smoothed down the gray coat over her slender hips, adjusted the gray silk tie at her throat, and waited.
He came, in his habitual cloud of dust; pulled up his pony within ten feet of the obstruction; saw the saddle 76 hanging at a dangerous angle over Tuesday’s side; and accepted the obvious conclusion that Miss Marion Gaylord, looking very warm and embarrassed, but certainly very pretty in her confusion, had narrowly escaped a fall.
“I think I’d better help you with that, Miss Gaylord,” he said.
“Thank you!” she said, with an appealing reluctance. “I can do it––I often saddle my own horse, and––”
“I should judge that you had saddled him this time,” he interrupted her to say, without the slightest trace of irony in his tone.
She bit her lip, as she silently made way for him, and stood at Tuesday’s head, stroking his neck with one small, gloved hand while Haig adjusted the blanket, fitted the saddle firmly, and tightened the double cinch. He was dressed in the nondescript costume he had worn at their first meeting. That same hat, uniquely insolent, soiled and limp and disreputable, was stuck on the back of his head, revealing a full, clean-moulded brow, over which, at one side, his thick black hair fell carelessly. His eyes were calm gray rather than stormy black to-day, but a gray that was singularly dark and deep and luminous. His manner was in the strangest contrast with the two different moods in which she had already seen him––as if the fires were out, as if all emotion and interest had been dissolved in listlessness. And she divined at once that her chance of success was small.