"That they came from Greyson?"
"No, Steve, no! How could you think such a thing? I thought that Dad had relented and—and had sent the roses to——" she winked her lashes furiously but not before Steve had seen the diamond-like drops that beaded them. His voice was tender as he comforted:
"Your father will come round, Jerry. Just believe with old Doc Rand that things have a way of coming marvelously, unbelievably right. You are not sorry that you came, are you?"
"I'll say I'm not!" She had essayed an imitation of his voice and words but the emotion which had threatened her all day surged in her heart and betrayed her. Steve caught her hands in his.
"Don't look like that, little girl. You're going to love the life here and the ranch and—and—and Goober," he added with a short laugh as the dog bounded into the room.
CHAPTER VIII
Jerry Courtlandt sent her horse up the slope and came out on a bluff above the Double O. As the girl sat motionless looking off over the plain, an artist would have labeled the picture she made, "A Study in Browns," before he slipped it into his mental portfolio. Her mount, Patches, was a deep mahogany in color, her riding boots were but a shade lighter than his satin skin, her breeches and long coat were of khaki, her blouse was fawn color, her eyes were deeply, darkly bronze. Rebellious tendrils of lustrous brown hair escaped from under the broad brim of the campaign hat she wore, one of Steve's army hats with its gold and black cord. He had insisted upon her using it. The hats she had brought to the ranch had been urban affairs, not designed to shade her eyes from the glare of white roads. As she had had no money with which to buy another she had taken it.
Jerry pulled it off as she took a deep breath of the glorious air asparkle with bubbles of life. She loved the spot. Every day that she rode she stopped to look down upon the valley. Far away among the foot-hills a silver stream cleft rocky bluffs, then coiled and foamed its way until it broadened and flashed in gleaming waterfalls. In places where it boiled and frothed rustic bridges had been thrown across. Toward the east lay the sturdily built stock corrals, storehouses spick and span with whitewash, towering silos. Toward the west were fenced-off alfalfa fields and beyond them a mosaic of varicolored pasture-lands, dotted with grazing herds, stretched out to the foot-hills.
Beyond the foot-hills loomed mountains darkly green with pine and spruce to the timberline, above which reared sombre, forbidding rock until against the ragged edge of gold-lined clouds, white peaks flamed crimson in the slanting sun. Toward the north she could see the gap in the mountains through which the railroad cut. The gap was known as the Devil's Hold-up because of the natural facilities it had offered—and still offered for that matter,—to the class whose pleasing pastime it had been to maintain their divine right in the other man's property at the point of a gun.