Game! Sandy looked at the supple strength of her, so subtly knit in curves of graciousness, alert and upright in the new saddle, Panama hat in one hand, the better to get the wind full in her face, her cheeks flushed with the caress of it, the thick brown braids fluffing here and there;—she was the essence of gameness. He had quoted Lasca to her once—a line or two. More came to him now.
To ride with me and forever ride,
From San Saba's shore to Valacca's tide.
Molly, who had told him, the first time the woman-look had come into her eyes, "Yo're sure a white man. I'll git even with you some time if I work the bones of my fingers through the flesh fo' you. Thanks don't 'mount to a damn 'thout somethin' back of them 'em. I'll come through."
That Molly, and yet another Molly, swiftly maturing, with all life opening up before her to wider horizons than would have been hers if she had stayed back west.
I want free life and I want free air,
And I sigh for the canter after the cattle,
The crack of whips like shots in battle,
The mêlée of horns and hoofs and heads.
Pronto's hoofs beat out the cantering rhythm of the poem.
That wars and wrangles and scatters and spreads,
The green beneath and the blue above,
And dash and danger and life and——
He had stopped the quotation there before. Now he finished the stanza,
——and life and love
And Lasca!
Only it was Molly! The knowledge swept over Sandy and left him tingling. Love came to him, the first, clean white flame of first love, burning like a lamp in the heart of a man. It was for this, he knew, that he had been woman-shy, that he had cherished his own thought of womanhood as something so rare a thought might tarnish it. First love, shorn of boy fallacies, strong, irresistible, protective, passionate. He closed his eyes and, for the first time in his life, touched leather, gripping the horn of his saddle as if he would squeeze it to a pulp.