The Mexican laughed loudly, winking at his companions.
Shannon could feel the burning flush that suffused her face. She closed her eyes in what was almost physical pain, so terrible did the humiliation torture her pride, and then came the nausea of disgust. The man had dropped her reins, and she wheeled Baldy about.
“You will not come Friday night?” she asked, wishing some assurance that her sacrifice had not been entirely unavailing.
“Mr. Pennington will not find us Friday night, and so he will not be shot.”
She rode away then; but there was a vague suspicion lurking in her mind that there had been a double meaning in the man’s final words.
Custer Pennington, occupied in the office for a couple of hours after lunch, had just come from the house, and was standing on the brow of the hill looking out over the ranch toward the mountains. His gaze, wandering idly at first, was suddenly riveted upon a tiny speck moving downward from the mouth of a distant ravine—a moving speck which he recognized, even at that distance, to be a horseman, where no horseman should have been. For a moment he watched it, and then, returning to the house, he brought out a pair of binoculars.
Now the speck had disappeared; but he knew that it was down in the bottom of the basin, hidden by the ridge above Jackknife Cañon, and he waited for the time when it would reappear on the crest. For five, ten, fifteen minutes he watched the spot where the rider should come into view once more. Then he saw a movement in the brush and leveled his glasses upon the spot, following the half seen figure until it emerged into a space clear of chaparral. Now they were clearly revealed by the powerful lenses, the horse and its rider—Baldy and Shannon!
Pennington dropped the glasses at his side, a puzzled expression on his face, as he tried to find some explanation of the fact that the binoculars had revealed. From time to time he caught glimpses of her again as she rode down the cañon; but when, after a considerable time, she did not emerge upon the road leading to the house, he guessed that she had crossed over El Camino Corto. Why she should do this he could not even conjecture. It was entirely out of her way, and a hilly trail, while the other was a wagon road leading almost directly from Sycamore to her house.
Presently he walked around the house to the north side of the hill, where he had a view of the valley spreading to the east and the west and the north. Toward the west he could see the road that ran above the Evanses’ house all the way to Horse Camp Cañon.
He did not know why he stood there watching for Shannon. It was none of his affair where she rode, or when. It seemed strange, though, that she should have ridden alone into the hills after having refused to ride with him. It surprised him, and troubled him, too, for it was the first suggestion that Shannon could commit even the most trivial act of underhandedness.