She pondered over this assertion while Bart finished his breakfast.
“Carver tricked me, sort of,” Bart amplified. “He couldn’t dissuade me from setting out after Noll, but I made a rash statement that I’d stay here on the place for one year from the day Noll’s case was settled, having in mind, of course, that I’d do the settling myself but neglecting to state it that way. Well, Noll’s case is settled, though not just the way I’d planned it, and here I am. No more trips to town until Don says the word.”
“I’m glad, Bart,” Molly said. “It’s so much better this way instead of your being mixed up with it yourself. Don’t you see?”
He pushed back his chair and regarded her.
“I’ll never be convinced but what I’d ought to have done it myself,” Bart insisted. “I would have too, if you hadn’t talked Don into beating me to it. He knew you’d rather it would be him than me.”
Bart rose and moved about the room, commenting upon certain angles of the case and from these fragments she was able to piece out the whole picture. Bart spoke casually, believing that she had already become acquainted with every phase of the affair. The girl sat very still, her hands clenched in her lap. So it had been Carver. She had never given that a thought until now, had not entertained even a suspicion of the truth, and Bart was assuming that she knew every detail; that she was responsible for having sent Carver. An hour past she had told herself that Don understood her so well while in reality he understood her so little that he had imagined she was sending him forth on such a mission as that.
“But why in God’s name didn’t he let the posse go out instead of going alone?” she asked at last.
“That’s just what he couldn’t do,” Bart dissented. “He knew that it was on account of his own personal disagreement with Noll that Bradshaw had been shot down, that it didn’t have any relation to the county-seat squabble whatever. If the marshal’s boys had gone boiling across into the brush after Noll there was a good chance that some other good men would go the same route that Brad had. Don couldn’t chance that. It was his own personal trouble and he felt obliged to take all the risks on himself.”
She knew that Carver’s action, judged by the standards of his kind, would command respect. But if only he had been content to stand back and let the marshal’s men go out as a whole! It would then have seemed an impersonal sort of affair instead of becoming openly known as a personal issue between the two men. Even though she herself had always refused to look upon Noll as a relative the world at large would not hold that view. Centuries of custom decreed that such an occurrence as this should operate as an insurmountable barrier between Don and herself. There would always be that between them. Tongues would wag until the end of time if they should violate that age-old tradition by permitting any relationship deeper than mere acquaintance between them. She must see Don and explain it all to him. He had made such an unalterable mistake; had understood her so little. But she could not see him till after the trouble at Oval Springs had been settled and he returned to the ranch.
Even at that moment the county-seat war was nearing an abrupt termination. Oval Springs had grown with amazing rapidity and there was no longer an object in the refusal of the railroad company to halt its trains at that point, the reverse now being true.