"If you do slip up," he said bluntly, "if Red Shandon does hear about it and gets busy, let me know. If he starts making trouble I can put him where he'll be out of the way!"
The door closed loudly behind him.
CHAPTER X
SHANDON'S GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
Wayne Shandon had grown more silent, more thoughtful than men had ever known him. The two things which had come to him, one as unheralded as the other, the gladness of a deep love, the bitterness which grew out of Martin Leland's words, he kept to himself. He rode far and alone, seeing very little of the men of the Bar L-M or of Garth, to whom he still left the routine of the range, and who made the most of small pretexts to keep up of Wayne's way. Shandon wanted time to think coolly and deliberately for the first time in his life; he wanted time to look inward as well as at what lay without, to cast up the balance of what sums of good and bad were in his soul.
Until now he had been quite content with life as he found it. It had afforded him infinite pleasure, it bubbled up sparklingly from the fountain of contented youth, there had been no need for him to seek to change its flashing current. Moreover, he had never had an incentive to bestir himself. But that incentive had come now, a two-pronged goad; he was compelled to look to himself, to his own positive effort, for what came next.
Vaguely, at first, he realised that a man if he be a man, has certain responsibilities. He saw clearly, now that he considered life seriously, that a man might err in dalliance and idleness just as he had erred; and he saw too that a man might, like Sledge Hume, go to the other extreme. A man might grow soft muscled literally and figuratively in slothful carelessness, or he might grow hard until he became a machine. He felt dimly that he ought to be doing something like other men. He wanted his life to live freely as he knew how, largely as he sought to learn how. And he wanted Wanda.
At first he was like a sea-worthy ship, in a calm with no definite port in sight. But, in due course, from the one vital fact of his love for Wanda other facts materialised. To begin with he thought with diminishing bitterness of old Martin Leland. The man was old, and he loved his daughter. Rumours of a wild life fly incredibly high and far and fast. Such rumours of Red Reckless's doings had come to Leland's ears, and perhaps it was natural enough that Leland believed them. Shandon had always known his neighbour as a hard man but a just. He made up his mind not to quarrel with him, but instead to so change the tenor of his life that Martin Leland would notice and would approve. If in taking Wanda to her new home he closed her old one to her he would be hurting her.
He saw clearly, there being little foolish conceit in the man's makeup, that he was not worthy. And he understood, though vaguely at first, that it must be his one object now to become as worthy as any man could be of her. And when the fifth day came and Ruf Ettinger rode to the Bar L-M with excitement dancing in his eyes and his tongue clacking, Shandon thought that he saw a beginning.