“Uncle Philip, we will explain later,” she said, with emphasis. “The first thing is to get Ben home.”
“Yes, that’s so!” Davison admitted, his anxiety for Ben betrayed in his shaking voice.
Ben was helped into the photograph wagon; where he would not lie down, but insisted on sitting in the driver’s seat. Justin assisted Lucy into the wagon. It was a large wagon, in which Fogg had lived and slept in the old days when he went about taking photographs and selling curios. Justin wished he might climb in there by Lucy’s side, and do something, or say something, that would allay her evident distress. Her voice was unnaturally hard, and her manner singularly abrupt and emphatic. He knew that she was suffering.
And he had not known she was in Paradise Valley! That was the most inexplicable of all—that she should be there and no one on the ranch aware of the fact.
“She must have arrived on the evening train,” was his conclusion.
However, that explained little. How did she and Ben chance to be there by the river? Had they been walking home from the town together—through the storm? Where was Ben’s pony? That might have escaped from him, or he might have left it somewhere; but the other question was not to be answered readily. The whole subject was so cloaked in the mysterious that it seemed to defy analysis.
The storm still raged, with sheets of beating rain, with lightning fire and roll of thunder, as the wagon moved swiftly in the direction of the ranch house along the soaked and gullied trail. And behind it, galloping on his cow-pony, rode Justin, pondering the meaning and the mystery of the things he had seen and heard.
Yet through it all there was a certain sense of joy and gratification. He had been able to serve the woman he loved, and she was here at home. The first long, long separation was ended—she was home again.
CHAPTER XV
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING
As the photograph wagon was halted at the gate which led to the ranch house grounds Lucy Davison spoke to Justin, from the rear of the wagon. Her tones were solicitous, and anxious: