Her glance said, “You certainly have got your gall with you!” But her answer was much more dignified, “By what right do you ask?”
“The right of a man who loves you.”
It was a fine stroke; established at once his freedom to meddle with her affairs. His right in the premises would have been upheld in any ancient court of love. Though she tried to conceal it from herself, it was so conceded by one girl’s fluttering heart. As a matter of fact, she had been aching for a week to hear him say it; yet, with that natural cruelty which is displayed alike by cats and maids in torturing mice and men, she proceeded to deny it.
“Yes?” she raised cool brows. “Judging by what I saw in the cañon—it must be recent.”
She looked for him to wither, but—the fellow refused! He did not even flinch. On the contrary, he just looked at her with shining earnestness; sat his saddle so trim, erect, irritatingly handsome, that she couldn’t help taking notice. No, he was not to be side-tracked by such light subterfuge! He swept it away with masculine bluntness.
“I thought so myself—but now I know. It was all so strange, wonderful, picturesque, this new life, that I was blinded. I knew that I liked you, but never paused to analyze my feelings, and it wasn’t till you shot that announcement at me a week ago that I awoke—awoke to the fact that all of it, the beauty, romance, centered on you. Since then, the life and light have faded, leaving it drab and drear.”
This was not all. Laying it down, as it were, for his major premise, he built thereon, worked, and enlarged, and embroidered while she played with the coils of her riata. As an oratorical effort, it could not compare with fire and passion, melodious swing of Ramon’s rhythmical Spanish. But what it lacked in eloquence it made up in sincere, vibrant feeling. The stronger for its reserves, it was just such a talk any honest young Anglo-Saxon might make to his lady-love. And if judged by its effects, it must be regarded as successful, for long before he finished two large tears made small splashes on her pommel.
“When—when did you find this out?”
She had intended it to be light, if not satirical; but the little hesitation, helped out by a sympathetic quiver, basely betrayed her hunger for more.
Be certain she got it—in detail, not a thing left out. With a touch of poetry, now, he told of his marvelous discovery on the morning they had ridden over to the widow’s together that the sunlight proceeded from her hair; also the freshness of the morning, roll of tawny plains, breath of the chaparral, all that was beautiful in creation.