She gave him a quick smile and rode off without a word of good-by. He watched her moving figure through the dust until she was out of sight beyond the creek swamp, and then he proceeded more slowly toward the turpentine camp. He was both elated and uneasy, with such a sense of tingling delight in his heart as he had never expected to feel again.
Directly after supper, on the second day afterwards, he was waiting in the saddle on the bayou bridge. He waited a quarter of an hour before he saw Louise riding slowly down the slope.
“What news? Anything?” he questioned.
“Nothing changed. Everything the same,” she answered. She did not seem to want to talk about it this evening. There was an hour and a half of daylight left, and they rode slowly down the soft road through the turpentine pines.
They saw nobody but a couple of negroes with mule teams. Louise did not appear depressed; on the contrary she was in nervously high spirits, ready to chatter lightly. The big issues were dropped. They talked of trifling matters, of their likes and dislikes, intimate and personal things. They exchanged reminiscences of the motor shop in New Orleans; Louise told amusing incidents of her childhood up the river. Those old days had not been all bad, it seemed. That ride brought them into closer personal touch than anything before, Lockwood felt; but it was too short. Dusk seemed to fall like an evil magic, and they turned back. Lockwood stopped on the bridge where they had met, and he watched Louise fading up the road through the twilight.
That was the first of four such rides—once more in the evening, once on the afternoon of a day when heavy sudden rain had driven the wood negroes in, and all the clay roadsides glittered red and vermilion and green as if freshly washed with rainbow paint; and once in the cool of an early Sunday morning.
Few and brief as they were, these hours were the most delicious and exciting that Lockwood had ever known. He was supposed to be gathering information and planning tactics, but they hardly ever talked of the problematic situation. Behind each of them was an unhappy past which they put out of sight, and a threatening future which they ignored for the moment. Things were at a standstill at the Power house; nothing was to be done at the moment. They talked mostly of trivial things, but these all seemed momentous. They were on terms of the frankest comradeship, and not a word was interchanged that might not have been pronounced in public; yet Lockwood had a heavily increasing sense of guilt.
These half surreptitious rides were not the thing. Social customs are rigid in the rural South. Under no circumstances would Louise’s family have permitted them. Plenty of people had seen them, and the affair would not be long in being talked of. Old Henry was sure to hear of it. Trouble would come of it; Hanna would take advantage of it; for he was certain that Hanna had already sensed Lockwood’s hostility. Yet he could not give up this sole means of remaining in touch with Louise.
He had not set eyes on Henry Power since the day of his visit. Once the boys had motored past him on the road, but at such speed that he could not tell whether they had returned his salutation or not. But he felt a coolness in the whole district, that must have proceeded from that house. Mr. Ferrell was no longer so genial when he handed out the mail; and the usual hearty greetings of the farmers about the store had diminished to perfunctory nods, and side glances of suspicion. Slander was going about him, but he could not guess what form it was taking.
A few days later Charley Craig called him aside to the office.