“Oh, nothing, exactly. There was just a sort of effect of coolness—not his usual manner.”
“I don’t know. You should have asked him,” said Louise carelessly, almost abruptly, and she urged her horse a little faster.
Lockwood felt rebuffed. There was something wrong, and it had been communicated to Louise. He followed a little behind her, and nothing more was said until they came to the glare of the main road. Lockwood felt desperate as what might be his last chance slipped by.
“You’re not in a hurry to go home. We might ride a little farther, where it’s cooler,” he suggested without hope.
Louise hesitated and looked at her wrist watch.
“I ought to go back before it gets any hotter.” She paused irresolutely. “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere. Up the trail through the pine woods. I don’t think the mosquitoes will bother us.”
Louise cast a somewhat anxious glance down the empty road toward the store, and then turned her horse into the path Lockwood indicated, in silence.
It was a rude wagon trail cut diagonally back through the woods toward the river, and the horses trod noiselessly on the deep-packed pine needles. There was not much coolness among the big trees, and Louise commented on the heat again. They discussed the weather conventionally, the woods, the flowers, the run of turpentine gum, with long silences. Lockwood felt tongue-tied and embarrassed and foolish, cursing the evil spell that seemed to have fallen over all his relations with the Power family. Louise was apparently willing to ride with him, but she seemed to make it markedly apparent that she had withdrawn her intimacy. They might as well have ridden straight home after all.
The road sagged down to a creek-bed, dense with titi and bay-trees. Mosquitoes and yellow-flies boiled out of the swamp. A long black snake, frog hunting, shot into the creek like black lightning, and Louise put on speed and splashed through the water and up the slope to higher ground, away from the insects. The trail debouched into another. Lockwood recognized the region where he had encountered Hanna on the first day of his coming.