An hour later the proceeds derived from the sale of the saddle had faded in the face of the bank’s per cent and their finances were totally exhausted except for a few small coins in Carver’s pocket. Lassiter leaned rather heavily against the bar in the Silver Dollar and straightened himself with an effort.
“It’s time for me to dangle,” he announced. “Hate to break up the party and all that sort of thing, but I’m overdue right now. Meet you here in an hour.”
He proceeded toward the door which opened into the adjoining restaurant but Carver overhauled him while he was yet some ten feet from his goal.
“Now don’t you go trickling out on me,” he reproved. “I’ll be gone in an hour—riding off for three weeks. Stay with me till then and we’ll both move out together.”
Lassiter turned uncertainly and Carver, looking past him, discovered that the swinging door into the restaurant stood half-open. The young girl framed in the doorway was gazing straight into his eyes. Oddly enough his first thought took the form of an intense desire to expend large sums of money in buying things for her, this impulse coupled with a swift regret that such amounts as he wished to squander were not for the moment available. The eyes that looked back into his were gray eyes, bordering on blue; and he gathered that they regarded him with a mixture of doubt and pity. He straightened resentfully, never having been doubted and refusing to be pitied, flooded with a sense of having been detected in some bit of wickedness. For the first time in his life his own eyes dropped before the direct gaze of another’s yet in his whole past career there was not one deed for which he felt any particular regret or shame. He lifted his eyes again with a hint of defiance, but found himself staring at the blank swinging door; in that split-second of averted glance the vision had disappeared, leaving him with a vague impression of its unreality,—and with a pronounced disinclination for continuing the party. Lassiter had not seen, and Carver dispelled the blond youth’s hesitation.
“Maybe we’d better call it a day,” he said. “See you when I get back from the Strip.”
Carver was conscious of a distaste for his surroundings, once the door had closed behind his companion. These carousals in town always palled on him in the end, giving way to the urge to straddle a horse and be off through the clean outdoors while the wind fanned the fumes from his head, but heretofore this state of mind had come about through gradual transition instead of descending upon him in a single second as had been the case to-day.
He gravitated to the roulette wheel through force of habit and risked his handful of small coins, playing absently and placing his bets without care or consideration. Now just why, he wondered, had he been struck with a wild wish to buy things for a girl he had never glimpsed before in his life. He was not conscious that she had been shabbily clothed, for to save his immortal soul he could not have testified to the color, texture or state of preservation of one single item of her attire, but someway he felt that she was needing things and he wanted to see that these things were provided. He cashed in his few remaining chips and the banker handed him a single silver dollar in return.
II
Carver repaired to the shack to retrieve his horse and as he rode back through town he observed a group round the town well in the center of the wide main street. Mattison had laid aside his personal pursuits and had donned his official rôle of town marshal, in which capacity he was instructing Bart Lassiter in no uncertain terms as to the impropriety of watering his horse from the oaken bucket attached to the well rope.