She turned to Wade with real gentleness in her tones.
“I’m afraid he hurt you. It’s a rough country up here. If you hadn’t been trying to help me it wouldn’t have happened. He had no right to—” She checked herself suddenly, and her cheeks flamed.
“That wasn’t a fair twit about my sticking my nose into your affairs, Miss Nina,” protested Britt, and turning from her he visited his rage vicariously on his time-keeper, taking him by the arm and starting to drag him. “I told you to get aboard!” he rasped. “And when my men that I hire don’t do as I tell ’em to do, I kick ’em aboard—and a time-keeper is no better than a swamper with me when he leaves this railroad. You want to understand those things and save lots of trouble.”
“You take your hand off my arm, Mr. Britt,” said the young man. He did not speak loudly, but there was something in his voice that impressed the Honorable Pulaski, who knew men.
“Now,” resumed Wade, “for reasons of my own and that I don’t propose to explain, I am going to ride to Castonia settlement on this mail-stage.”
“It’s safe to go on the wagon,” persisted Britt, more mildly. “I tell you, if you mind your own business, I won’t let him lick you.”
With face gray and rigid at an insult that the old man couldn’t understand, Wade opened his mouth, then shut it, turned his back, and climbed aboard the coach. The girl moved along to the farther end, and gropingly and blindly, without thought as to where he was sitting, he took the place beside her.
He remembered that as they drove away Britt shook that hairy fist at him, and that some rude roisterer on the wagons lilted some doggerel about “the chaney man.” And through a sort of red mist he saw the face of Colin MacLeod.
They were miles along the rough road before he looked at the girl. At the movement of his head she turned her own, and in the piquant face above the big white bow of the veil he saw real sympathy.
He did not speak, but he looked into her clear eyes—eyes that had the country girl’s spirit and a resourcefulness beyond her years—and from them he drew a certain comfort.