They remounted and cantered silently toward home. Tom was revolving in his mind everything he knew about his friend, trying to find the key to the present situation. After a long time he recalled the conversation he and Ellhorn had had, as they sat on the top of the cattle-pen fence at Las Plumas, concerning the possibility of Mead’s being in love.
“Golly! I can’t ask him about that!” Tuttle thought, spurring his horse to faster pace. “But I reckon I’ll have to. I’ve got to find out what’s the matter with him, and then Nick and me have got to help him out, if we can.”
He rode close beside Mead and began: “Say, Emerson—” Then he coughed and blushed until his mustache looked a faded yellow against the deep crimson of his face. He glanced helplessly around, vaguely wishing some enemy might suddenly rise out of the hills whom it would be necessary to fight. But no living thing, save Emerson’s own cattle, was in sight. So, having begun, he rushed boldly on:
“Say, Emerson, I don’t want to be too curious about your affairs, but—this—this trouble you’re in—has it—is it—anything about a—a girl?”
Mead’s spurs instinctively touched his horse into a gallop as he answered, “Yes.”
“Miss Delarue?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t her father let her have you?”
Mead pulled his sombrero over his eyes with a sudden jerk, as the thought drove into his brain that he had not asked for her. The idea of asking Marguerite Delarue to marry him loomed before him as a gigantic impossibility, a thing not even to be dreamed of. He set his teeth together as he put into words for the first time the thing that was making him heart-sick, and plunged his spurs into the horse’s flank with a thrust that sent it flying forward in a headlong run:
“She’s going to marry Wellesly.”