She turned uneasily in her hammock, catching through the wistaria a glimpse of the open door of the dimly-lit bunkhouse. She could see the intermittent glow of Red's cigarette, and the glisten of the polished steel in the holster, hung carelessly on his bed-post. Suddenly she was infected by the magnificent extravagance of this western life, this queer jumble of loyalty, pride, poverty, sacrifice, sin, strength, suffering, fortitude and malignity. She felt a fierce satisfaction in living where men begged for the privilege of killing the enemies of their friends, and she felt almost grateful to Red for his savage appreciation of the courage which had transformed Douglass from his dearest foe into his dearest friend. She had even a greater reason to be grateful to him, had she only known it.
"He must not leave," she said with a fine determination. "It will check his career—and we owe so much to him. I am a super-sensitive little fool and I will make amends. Bobbie said we must 'make it up to him' and I will. He is a gentleman, and he will not make it hard for me." Comforted by her intuitive assurance of that fact she laid her soft cheek on the pillow at precisely the moment of Douglass's line assumption of indifference, and fell asleep.
But out in the kitchen an old woman was awkwardly stroking the head of an antelope kid. "I wonder ef I done right?" she mumbled. "I wonder!"
CHAPTER VII
BELSHAZZAR
In October the Colorado mountain lands are very beautiful. They lack, it is true, the gorgeous coloring of the eastern Indian summer, with its beauty of scarlets, crimsons, ochres, maroons and mauves, the western color scheme being in half-tints of low tone. The barbaric splendor of the eastern autumn is here reflected only in the evening skies and in the glowing grays, blues, browns, blacks, bronzes and golds of the eyes, hair and faces of the hardy mountaineers.
Over the foothills and valleys are spread tenderly the more delicate tints of the Master's palette; the enveiling haze is golden instead of purple, the tints of verdure and earth are softly subdued and blend together with all the exquisite harmony of an old Bokhara rug. Even the once-disfiguring alkali barrens appeal to the eye now, their velvet cloaks of ash-of-roses contrasting most agreeably with the delicate olive-grays and heliotropes of the sage and rabbit brush. Here and there a belated Indian-shot flaunts its brilliant lance and over yonder a cactus masks its treachery with a blush; an occasional larkspur or gentian raises blue eyes from the gentle hill slopes, and down on the plains the martial Spanish-bayonet parades its oriflamme. The whole landscape has an underlying wash of burnt sienna, glowing warmly through the superimposed color.
The forests are mysterious with silent flitting mouse-blue and gray-tawny shadows, and the dim trails and passes are incised with the quaint hieroglyphics which tell the story of the migrant deer. The oily black-green splashes of spruce and fir, the silvery valance of the aspens, and the ermine of the snow coronal against the puce of protruding peaks in the higher ranges are the only decided colors in mass. Of early mornings the mountain bases in the distances are billows of smoked-pearl mist; as the light strengthens and the temperature rises, the mist rises with it, dissipating gradually into thin wreaths of dainty rose-pink, faint orange—and nothingness. In the as yet undisturbed shadows the bold cliffs suggest to the imaginative mind aggregations of uncut crystals; higher up, where they catch the downward reflected rays of the warming sun, they are amber and wine-colored topazes, and on the ice-capped summits they are scintillant as diamonds. At midday the pure rarified air is a marvel of transparent clarity and everything is as clear cut as a cameo.
It is not until late in the afternoon that the great mystery evolves. All of a sudden one is aware of a decided and yet intangible change. Imperceptibly but surely the temperature falls, the quality of light alters, the heat shimmer is no more and a golden radiance replaces the brazen glare of the sun; into the nostrils steals an indescribable perfume, elusive and infrangible, the brown scent of autumn wafted to the senses on the cool breath of the frozen heights above. Instinctively the perceptions sharpen; this is the hour when beast and bird bestir themselves and the vista is enlivened with a new animation. Out of nowhere, seemingly, struts a sage hen with her brood; another and yet another materializes under your feet until it seems as if the very soil was being transmuted into patches of gray-speckled life. In the apparent vacancy of that soft-swelling knoll to the west looms up the phantom bulk of an antelope, disproportionately large and deceptively black against the sun. A dun-colored heap of trash at the foot of a sagebrush in the bight of the dry creek-bed below resolves itself into a very live-looking coyote which blinks yearningly at the unattainable venison on the knoll above, wistfully licks his chops and slinks evilly in the wake of the grouse broods.