Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her heroic mood. “Our friends”—she nodded toward the distant buildings—“are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to yourself.”
He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.
At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the patio gate, Lee did cheer up a little—partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom.
He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.”
He learned, partially, when Gordon handed him the widow’s recipe for “liniment,” after Lee had gone in and they were unsaddling at the stable. It ran:
“Dear Friend,—Sliver took Mr. Nevil to see Felicia at the fonda the other day, and Lee caught her wearing his watch-fob. It made her so mad she flirted her head off with Ramon.” In her ignorance of later developments, she had concluded: “But there is no harm done. She likes Mr. Nevil, and if you can just keep him away from the fonda, I am sure things will turn out all right.”
Bull read and reread the epistle a second and third time for his own pleasure, regardless of its sense. In its reverent tenderness there was something pathetic in the way he touched with his big forefingers the signature “Your friend, Mary Mills.” Gordon had almost finished caring for the horses before Bull placed the note in his shirt pocket after carefully wrapping it in a piece of newspaper. The ceremony completed, he fished for further information.
“Any one else there?” he inquired, nonchalantly.
“Young Mexican,” Gordon replied, with what, for him, was excessive curtness.
“Ramon Icarza, I reckon.” Bull went innocently on: “He an’ Miss Lee were almost what you could call raised together. She thinks a good deal of him—”