“Morning, Colonel,” he said; “I see the tropical calm of Foleys is affecting you. Take example by me—off for twenty miles across country to Thompson’s Flat.”
He ran down the steps and out into the road. There, standing in the dust putting on his gloves, he let a quick, investigating eye run over his horse.
“I intended starting at sun-up,” he said, “and then they went and forgot to wake me. Now I have to ride twenty miles over roads a foot deep in dust and under a sun as hot as a smelting furnace.”
“Shouldn’t have been so dissipated last night,” said the Colonel. “What time did you get to bed?”
The young man, who was adjusting his stirrup, turned round.
“Oh, that was the dearest little girl last night. Where’d you find her? And how did a girl like that ever grow up in a God-forsaken spot like Foleys?”
He vaulted into the saddle not waiting for an answer. Then as his horse, curvetting and backing in a last ecstasy of impatience, churned up a cloud of dust, he called,
“I’m quite fascinated. Going to stop over on my way back. Give May or April or June or whatever her name is, my love. Hasta mañana, old man!”
The horse, at length liberated, plunged forward and dashed up the road, the soft diminishing thud of its hoofs for a moment filling the silence. The stable-man slouched lazily off, and the Colonel was once more left to his cigar and his meditations.
These were soon as deeply engrossing as ever. With his eyes looking down the sun-steeped street he was not aware of a blue-clothed feminine figure which came into view along the highway upon which the balcony fronted. At first she walked quickly in a blaze of sun, then crossed the road, charily holding up her skirt, and approached in the shadow of the locusts. She wore a blue-and-white cotton dress, a sun-burnt straw hat, trimmed with a blue ribbon, and as she drew near was revealed to be a young girl in the end of her teens, large, finely-shaped, and erect.