He didn’t choose! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off alongside the charro suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common to two creatures under the sun—to wit, a bull being played with the capa by a skilful matador and a man under torture by a woman.
When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of a—well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a respectable blaze.
If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. But never for a moment was she deceived.
“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the situation.
With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer; also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.
A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, thereby, from a correct judgment of results.
“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I wonder who will score to-morrow?”
It was Lee.
“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. “You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.”
There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note that contained—at least so she said—the recipe for a liniment Terrubio used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.