“No, dearie, Mr. Mead can stoop over and help you on just as well as I can.”
“She is determined not to see me,” thought Mead. “She never did so before.”
Paul began to cry. “I can’t, Daisy. Truly, I can’t get on if you don’t come. And then I can’t have any ride.”
Marguerite came out with a little, white, high-crowned sunbonnet pulled over her head. She had been arranging her hair and had put on the bonnet to conceal its disarray, when she found that the child could not be persuaded to let her remain indoors. Mead thought her face more adorable than ever as it looked out from its dainty frame. Paul kicked his heels into the horse’s shoulders, but a firm hand held the bridle and the animal did not move. Marguerite turned a smiling face upon Mead and met in his eyes the same look she always saw there. She glanced down again, blushing, and felt the silence embarrassing, but all the things she would ordinarily have said suddenly seemed trivial and out of place, so she turned to the child with a gentle, “Be a good boy, Paul.” Mead looked at her in silence, smiling gravely. Many things were whirling about in his mind to say, but he hesitated before each one, doubting if that were the best. Paul kicked vigorously and shouted, “Come on! Come on! Aren’t you ready to go, Mr. Mead?” Emerson’s grave smile relaxed into a foolish grin, he lifted his hat to Marguerite, and he and the boy cantered off.
Marguerite hurried back to her room and as she stood before her mirror, trembling, she resumed her hair dressing to the accompaniment of thoughts that ran contrariwise:
“I would think the man was dumb if I didn’t know better. Why doesn’t he ever say anything? He is certainly the rudest creature I ever saw! He stares at me until I am so confused that I can not even be courteous. He isn’t nearly so nice as Mr. Wellesly—I don’t care, he isn’t! I like Mr. Wellesly, and he seems to like me, but—he does not look at me out of his eyes as Mr. Mead does. I wonder—if he—looks at any one else that way?”
After Mead had returned the child he rode at once to his room, and while he bathed and shaved and dressed himself in the garments of civilization he gave himself up to gloomy thoughts about Marguerite.
“Of course, she thinks I am a criminal of the worst sort,—a thief and a murderer,—and maybe she does not like to have me stop at her gate. She was nervous about it to-day, and she wouldn’t come out until the kid made her. It is plain enough that she doesn’t want to see me any more, and I suppose I ought not to stop there again. Still, the boy is always so pleased to ride with me that it would be a shame to take that pleasure away from him. But she doesn’t like it—how sweet she looked in that sunbonnet!—and she’s too kind-hearted to ask me not to. Well, she would rather I would not—yes, it is plain that she does not want me to do it—so—well—all right—I’ll not stop there again.”
His revolver lay on the table, hidden by some of the clothing he had just taken off. Under the stress of his thoughts it escaped both eye and mind. As he put on vest and coat he struggled to his final resolution. Then he quickly jammed his hat on his head, thinking, “I suppose I can’t see her any more at all,” and hurried into the street. Presently he heard a loud whoop from the direction of the jail. “That’s Nick’s yell, sure,” he thought, “and it sounds as if he was drunk. Now what’s to pay, I wonder!”
He hurried in the direction from which the sound had come, and was just in time to see Ellhorn, yelling and waving his hat, led by Jim Halliday into the jail, while a half-dozen excited Chinese, who had been following close behind, stood chattering at the door.