She was exactly the type of girl he had dreamed he would like to marry some day when life had quieted down. She was of the spirit, not the flesh. Yet she was beautiful to look upon. Her hair was a dark, curling brown, full of delicate waves even on the top of her head. Her hands were dainty. Her body was a slender poem in willowy, graceful lines. Her voice was the softest Southern drawl.
The Kennedys were not slave holders. The pretty daughter joyfully helped her mother when she came home from school. Her sentiments were Southern without the over emphasis sometimes heard among the prouder daughters of the old regime. These Southern sentiments formed another impassable barrier. Cook said this a hundred times to himself and sought to make the barrier more formidable by repeating aloud his own creed when in his room alone.
The fight was vain. He drifted into seeing her a few minutes alone each day. She had liked him from the first. He felt it. He knew it. He had liked her from the first, and she knew it.
Each night he swore he'd go to bed without seeing her and each night he laughed and said:
"Just this once more and it won't count."
He felt himself drifting into a tragedy. Yet to save his life he couldn't lay hold of anything that would stand the strain of the sweet invitation in those brown eyes.
To avoid her he spent days tramping over the hills. And always he came back more charmed than ever. The spell she was weaving about his heart was resistless.
CHAPTER XXVI
Brown returned to Kansas with Stevens and Kagi, his two bravest and most intelligent disciples.
If he could make the tryout of his plan sufficiently sensational, his prestige would be restored, his chief disciples become trained veterans and his treasury be filled.