Her mental ejaculation expressed on the surface only mischief. But under it a deeper feeling moved like a stir of wind through sultry heat. Was it the widow’s “wind” fanning an unsuspected flame? Perhaps. At least when, looking back after they rode on, she saw the same dark gaze following, enwrapping Gordon, she was seized with sudden unhappiness. Plainly as the day that dark gaze spoke:
“I am yours!”
After they had ridden on, out of sight, and her beast was scrambling after Gordon’s up the mule trail that rose in a series of zigzag staircases, the little queer looks at his back asked a vital question.
[XVII: —BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK]
When they rode in to the rancho that afternoon, the “wind”—that is, Ramon—had not yet “blown in”; so there were no complications to interfere with the widow’s first attempts at diagnosis of the “case.” She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her across to the veranda.
“Promising,” she inwardly commented.
A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow’s bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:
“Ramon is coming.”
“Yes? Isabel too?”
An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills’s belief that the indifference was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. “No, it was quite accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and show me to-day.”