“Well, get up, Romeo, we’ve got to reach that girl before Mendoza dumps her in the ditch and gets her mussed up or the boss’ll fire us both.”
Romeo, a good-looking gray, with an excitable nature, snorted as he felt the touch of the whip and dragged his gentler mate into a lively trot. A new moon, clear cut and beautiful, was rising behind them, over the tall mountains, making the valley—so bare by day—lovely and mysterious in its half light.
“No kind of a night to be driving around with a dog, Yellow,” remarked the driver, reproachfully. “Men and moonlight are made for better things.”
The horses trotted briskly; they were covering ground rapidly. They ought, Marc figured, to meet the machine this side of Junipero Hill, a steep and cruel grade which he would be glad to spare his horses if he could. If Mendoza was making any sort of speed he ought to have come that far. He began to watch for the lights of the machine. The girl must be plucky, even if she was foolish, to dare a trip like this with a strange Mexican.
Well, he was glad Bob’s sister was nervy; he liked nervy girls and he liked Bob. Usually fellows who came out from college and took positions over other men’s heads made fools of themselves; but Bob was not a fool. He was a decent, likable young chap, who knew he had been luckier than the next fellow and who took no advantage of it.
“Which is more than you can say of most rich men’s sons,” soliloquized Scott. “But then why should you expect sense from a rich man’s son? Where’d they get it? It’s hard knocks gives a man sense—if he’s ever going to get it, which most of them ain’t!”
There was loneliness in the air. Scott, who was temperamental, as out-of-doors men often are, felt it keenly. It brought before him more clearly the loneliness of his own life, a life spent in out-of-the-way places, largely among men; a life with no roots, he sometimes felt. Yet he would not have traded his freedom, he would have told you, for any woman, for a home or for children. To be foot loose, to go where fancy called him, to have no ties—no clogs upon his precious liberty, that was what he loved.
He was fond of women, too. He liked being with them and he liked measuring each one he met with his ideal, a hazy creature who probably did not exist. Well, he rather hoped she didn’t, or if she did that he would never meet her. He had known too many men who had traded their freedom for a home and a fireside and who, once bound, had never been able to go back to the old life. It had not always been the women who had held them, either; the men themselves had seemed to change—to deteriorate, Scott would have said—to have lost the energy and the vigor that made life worth while. You cannot get anything for nothing and you paid for the happiness you might find in marriage with the loss of the one thing which was to him the most important thing in all life—liberty.
So they jogged along, Scott whistling to keep himself company. Occasionally, Yellow would insist upon getting out for a run, but he seemed glad to return. After a while it began to seem odd to Scott that he did not see the lights of Mendoza’s car. Even a cautious driver should have made the distance by this time.
Suddenly, an idea popped into his head—one of those clammy ideas, which come instantly, and come with a chill; ideas that are positively physical in the way in which they affect one. Suppose it was Mendoza’s car with someone else driving it? Someone of the score of half-breeds who hung around the livery stable where the car was kept? Scott leaned over and laid the whip on the innocent Romeo.