"All right," said the young man cheerily. "There's a good deal of snow on the ground but it was blown off the trail for the most part. Some friends have provided us with the means of going forward."
"But I don't understand.'
"We'll finish the sandwiches, and melt some snow for water, and then mount. Look—see those two Indian ponies fastened to the tongue of the stage? They'll carry us to the next station like the wind."
She stared from the window, bewildered.
"I don't know any more about them than you," he answered her thoughts. "But there they are and here we are." He said nothing about the bodies evidently carried away by those who had brought the ponies. "It's all a mystery—a mystery of the plains. I haven't unraveled the very first thread of—it. What's the use? The western way is to take what comes, isn't it, whether northers or ponies? There's a much bigger mystery than all that filling my mind."
"What is that?"
"You."
She bent over the sandwich with heightened color. "Poor Brick!" she murmured as if to divert his thoughts. But his sympathy just then was not for Brick.
"Lahoma, you said that this is a subject a man should bring up."
She looked at him brightly, still flushing. "Well?"