Still she saw him at night patrolling the cottonwoods before he slept!
She could not know what went on in the heart of that man, of the fight he waged with himself, of the struggle he made to stick to his creed: never to take a chance. He did not know that she was aware of those nightly vigils. The first had been on that night after he had played with her pride and her high spirits. Returned to the bunk house he had suddenly seen her not a smart, capable stranger but as a girl, alone, facing a new life, surrounded by strange people and unfriendly influences. He sensed a pity for her and walked back to look about the place and see that all was well, as he might have watched over a sleeping child.
And then, the day that the sorrel threw her, he had felt her body and the man in him had been stirred and when next he paced those shadows it was not as a protector of some defenseless life, but as one who quite tenderly lays siege to the heart of a woman.
He did not admit that even to himself. He reasoned that he was protecting her because she was a stranger in a strange land and that the impulse was only kindness. But his reason in that was a conscious lie for as he stood under the stars with the cool, quiet night all about him he could hear her voice in the murmur of the creek, hear her limbs rustling her skirts in the soft sigh of wind in the trees, could feel her presence there ... when he was stark alone....
And he fought it off, fought stubbornly, coldly because he did not know, he did not know love, did not know the ground into which he was being carried.
Women? He had had many but the experiences had been casual, mere surface rifflings, and he had never been stirred as this woman stirred him. It was new, entirely new, and Tom Beck feared that which he did not know.
He was accustomed to talk to his horses as men will who love them and while he rode the gulches alone he would in later days reason aloud with his own roan or the HC black or bay he used.
"Why, old stager, we can't take a chance like that!" he said time after time. "We've kept our heels out of trouble by playing a close game, not gettin' out on a limb, but up to now everything that come along has been boy's play ... compared to this.
"If an hombre took a chance with his love that'd be the limit, wouldn't it? He'd have his stack on the table, an' the deal wouldn't be more than started!"
He talked over the loves of other men with those horses, earnestly, soberly. He recalled the marriages he had known between men and women who were from the same stocks, who knew none but the same life; so many were failures! And this girl, this girl of whom he dreamed at night and thought by day, scarcely yet spoke his language!