“I want to see you before you leave town, Mr. Ranger.”
“Very well. I shall be here all the forenoon,” answered Cavanagh, in the tone of a man accepting a challenge; then, turning to the girl, he said, earnestly: “I want to help you. I shall be here for lunch, and meanwhile I wish you would take Redfield into your confidence. He’s a wise old boy, and everybody knows him. No one doubts his motives; besides, he has a family, and is rich and unhurried. Would you like me to talk with him?”
“If you will. I want to do right—indeed I do.”
“I’m sure of that,” he said, with eyes upon her flushed and quivering face. “There’s a way out, believe me.”
They parted on the little porch of the hotel, and her eyes followed his upright figure till he entered one of the shops. He had precisely the look and bearing of a young lieutenant in the regular army, and she wondered what Gregg’s demand meant. In his voice was both menace and contempt.
She returned to her own room, strangely heartened by her talk with the ranger. “If I stay here another night this room must be cleaned,” she decided, and approached the bed as though it harbored venomous reptiles. “This is one of the things that must be reformed,” she decided, harking back to the ranger’s quiet remark.
She was still pondering ways and means of making the room habitable when her mother came in.
“How’d you sleep last night?”
Lee Virginia could not bring herself to lie. “Not very well,” she admitted.
“Neither did I. Fact of the matter is your coming fairly upset me. I’ve been kind o’ used up for three months. I don’t know what ails me. I’d ought to go up to Sulphur to see a doctor, but there don’t seem to be any free time. I ’pear to have lost my grip. Food don’t give me any strength. I saw you talking with Ross Cavanagh. There’s a man—and Reddy. Reddy is what you may call a fancy rancher—goes in for alfalfy and fruit, and all that. He isn’t in the forest service for the pay or for graft. He’s got a regular palace up there above Sulphur—hot and cold water all through the house, a furnace in the cellar, and two bath-rooms, so they tell me; I never was in the place. Well, I must go back—I can’t trust them girls a minute.” She turned with a groan of pain. “’Pears like every joint in me is a-creakin’ to-day.”