"Would you have any objections, sir," the young man asked, "as I believe that you have no lady in charge, to ride in company with my sister on the way down?"
"Certainly not!" replied Townsend, though a little surprised at the salutation and request from one of the haughty Vanderlyns to whom he had not even been introduced. "I shall be proud of the charge, if your sister and yourself feel like placing so much confidence in an entire stranger."
"Oh, we know a gentleman when we see him!" replied the young man, not a little arrogantly, as it appeared to the lawyer, and with a sinister glance at the Illinoisan which indicated that it would have been some time before he was entrusted with the same responsibility.
"I am flattered!" said Townsend, with the bow which the speech demanded and yet did not deserve. "Do you remain on the top yourself?"
"No," answered the young man. "But the fact is that my horse kicks. He kicked my sister's pony twice in coming up; and I am afraid of some trouble in going down, if she rides behind me. It will be better for me to drop into the rear of all, where the ill-tempered devil cannot do injury to any one."
A few words of quasi-introduction and explanation between Vanderlyn, Clara and the lawyer followed; and Horace Townsend, who had come up the mountain without any lady and only in the casual companionship of a man who continually rode away and left him alone, found himself ready to go down it with the fairest member of the company in charge! Had nothing else intervened since the ride up from Littleton to the Profile and that long, steady glance of admiration which had then been bestowed upon the sweet face and auburn hair,—what a dangerous proximity this might have proved! But the human heart, expansive as it may be, has not quite the capacity of a stage-coach or a passenger-car; and to prevent falling in desperate love with one fascinating woman thrown in one's way, there is perhaps no guard so potent as being in real or fancied desperate love with another!
Halstead Rowan and the lady whom Townsend had reason to believe the object of his hope and his despair, had not been flung together and apart from others, for one moment during the day—Mr. Frank Vanderlyn had taken especially good care in that respect; though the lawyer had little cause to doubt that if both could have had their choice of companionship, they would have stood side by side and without others too near, by the High Altar which crowned the summit of the mountain, and spoken words difficult to unsay again during the lifetime of either. But if he had not been alone with Clara Vanderlyn, there is equally little doubt that he had looked at her much oftener than at the most admired point of scenery on the route. And as Frank Vanderlyn strolled away to his horse, and Townsend, with the lady obviously under his charge, was preparing to mount, he saw Rowan, with one foot in the stirrup and the other on the ground, looking over at him and his companion, with the most comical expression of wonder on his face that could well have been compressed into the same extent of physiognomy. The heart of the new knight-errant, which must have been a soft one or he would never have labored under that weakness, smote him at the thought of his apparent desertion; and with a word of apology he stepped away from the lady and approached the dismounted amateur Comanche.
"You don't mean to say that you are going to——" said the latter, and he nodded his head comically and yet a little pitifully towards Clara Vanderlyn.
"Ride down with Miss Vanderlyn? Yes!" answered the lawyer.
"And who the deuce asked you to do it, I should like to know?"