There were some qualms of uneasiness in her breast 57 that hour, some upbraidings of conscience for treason to Major King, of whom she had been girlishly fond, girlishly proud, womanly selfish. That quick, wild scene in the garden was not to be put away for all those arraignments of her honest heart, although it seemed impossible, recalled there in the thin hours of that long and eventful night, like something remembered of another, not of herself.
Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of that strong man’s wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips. She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to fly from a destructive lure.
Closing her eyes against the gray-creeping morning, she saw him again, standing that moment with her glove to his lips; saw him bend and speed away, the cunning of his hunted ancestors in his swift feet and self-eliminating form. A wild fear struck her, a cold dread fell like ashes into her heart, as she wondered how well he had ridden that night, and how far.
Perhaps he was lying in his blood that hour, never to come back to her again. Yet, why should it matter so much to her? Only that it was a gallant life gone out, whatever its faults had been; only the interest that she might have in any man who had danced with her, and told her his story, and spoken 58 of his designs. So she said, confessing with the same breath that it was a poor, self-deluding lie.
Back again in her home at the post, the day awake around her, reveille sounding in the barracks, she turned the key in her door as if to shut the secret in with her, and bent beneath the strain of her long suspense. She no longer tried to conceal, or to deny to her own heart, the love she bore that man, which had come so suddenly, and so fiercely sweet.
No longer past than the evening before her heart had ached with jealous pain over the little triumph that Nola Chadron had thought she was making of Major King. Now Nola might have Major King, and all the world beside that her little head might covet. There was no reservation in the surrender that she made of him in her conscience, no regret.
She reproached herself for it in one breath, and glowed with a strange new gladness the next, clasping the great secret fearfully in her breast, in the world-old delusion that she had come into possession of a treasure uniquely and singularly her own. One thing she understood plainly now; she never had loved Major King. What a revolution it was to overturn a life’s plans thus in a single night! thought she.
How easily we are astounded by the eruptions in our own affairs, and how disciplined in the end to find that the foundations of the world have withstood the shock!
Chadron himself had not gone out after Macdonald. 59 He had been merry among his guests long after the shots had sounded up the river. Frances believed that the old man had put the matter into the hands of his cowboys and ranch foreman, having no sons, no near male relatives of his own in that place. She did not know how many had gone in pursuit of Macdonald, but several horses were in the party which rode out of the gate. None had returned, she was certain, at the time the party dispersed. The chase must have led them far.
There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.