Book Two: The Estray
CHAPTER I
A WILD CAT
The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood a well with a high rustic top, and about this well on a certain brilliant July night, a tall man was strolling with his hands behind his back. It was a night of full moon, sailing high, which poured whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat, active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This effect was heightened by the fact that he never looked up. He was deep in some plan to which it was impossible for her not to believe that the curious pattern of his walk bore some relation.
From the northern wing of the ranch-house, strongly lighted, came a tumult of sound; music, thumping feet, a man’s voice chanting couplets:
| “Oh, you walk right through and you turn around and swing the girl that finds you, And you come right back by the same old track and turn the girl behind you.” |
Some one was directing a quadrille in native fashion. There was much laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily near at hand.
A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and, lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped. This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.
“You, Mabel, don’t you go home,” she said.