“You are looking well!” she cried gaily. It touched her to know that he still carried himself erect, that he was still a handsome, pleasant-eyed man, whom any woman might admire. “And really I’ve been thinking you were moping down here, and suffering from loneliness and hopeless love!”
“Love is no longer hopeless, when it is dead!” he declared, voicing an indifference he did not feel. Her light laugh fell like the sting of a whip. “Oh, dear me! Is it so serious as that? But of course I don’t believe anything you say. Love is a bright little humming-bird of a boy, who never dies. Truly, it must be lonesome down here, in this poky place. I can’t understand why you stay here. You might come to Denver!” She looked at him archly, half veiling her dark eyes with their lustrous lashes, while her horse pawed fretfully at the bank. “I mean it, Curtis. You could be as far from me in Denver as you are down here, if you wished to be. You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t think I could,” he said, and though his voice showed pain it showed resolution. “I find this a very good place. I like the quiet.”
“So that no one will ever trouble you while you’re studying or writing! You’ll be a great author or scientist some day, I don’t doubt.”
He did not answer.
“Well, good bye, Curtis. I’m not so bad as I seem, perhaps; you don’t see any horns or cloven hoof about me, do you?” She waved her hand. “And I’m glad to know you’re looking so well, and are so contented and happy!”
She gave her horse a cut with her riding whip and galloped away.
How many more times Sibyl Dudley (she had taken her maiden name) came to the little town by the mountain Curtis Clayton did not know, and never sought to discover; but one day he was almost startled, when Justin brought him news that Mary Jasper had accompanied Sibyl to Denver, and was to remain there with her.
Clayton at once mounted his horse and rode up the valley in the waning afternoon, to where Sloan Jasper’s house squatted by the stream in the midst of a green plume of cottonwoods of his own planting. He found Jasper in a stormy temper. There had been heavy August rains and a cloud-burst. The sluggish stream had overleaped its banks, smearing the alfalfa fields with sticky yellow mud and a tangle of weedy drift, in addition to softening the soil until it was a spongy muck. Hundreds of cattle had ploughed through the softened soil during the night, for the storm had torn out a section of fence and let them drift into the cultivated area of the valley. Standing with Jasper was Clem Arkwright.
“Glorious, sublime!” Arkwright was saying.