"I did not mean to say that."
"But you did say it."
"I do not know what I say when I am looking into your eyes."
"Flatterer!"
The music and perfume of those hours came back to him in fragments of dreams all through the long voyage;—in slumber broken by the intervals of rapid travel on river and rail; the crash of loading under the nickering yellow of pine-fires; the steam song of boats chanting welcome or warning; voices of mate and roustabout; the roar of railroad depots; the rumble of baggage in air heavy with the oily breath of perspiring locomotives; the demands of conductors; the announcement of stations;—and at last the heavy jolting of the Western stage over rugged roads where the soil had a faint pink flush, and great coarse yellow flowers were growing.
So the days and weeks and months passed on; and the far Western village, with its single glaring street of white sand, blazed under the summer sun. At intervals came the United States mail-courier, booted and spurred and armed to the teeth, bearing with him always one small satiny note, stamped with the postmark of New Orleans, and faintly perfumed as by the ghost of a magnolia.
"Smells like a woman—that," the bronzed rider sometimes growled out as he delivered the delicate missive with an unusually pleasant flash in his great falcon eyes—eyes made fiercely keen by watching the horizon cut by the fantastic outline of Indian graves, the spiral flight of savage smoke far off which signals danger, and the spiral flight of vultures which signals death.
One day he came without a letter for the engineer—"She's forgotten you this week, Cap," he said in answer to the interrogating look, and rode away through the belt of woods, redolent of resinous gums and down the winding ways to the plain, where the eyeless buffalo skulls glimmered under the sun. Thus he came and thus departed through the rosiness of many a Western sunset, and brought no smile to the expectant face: "She's forgotten you again, Cap."
And one tepid night (the 24th of August, 18—), from the spicy shadows of the woods there rang out a bird-voice with strange exotic tones: "Sweet, sweet, sweet!"—then cascades of dashing silver melody!—then long, liquid, passionate calls!—then a deep, rich ripple of caressing mellow notes, as of love languor oppressed that seeks to laugh. Men rose and went out under the moon to listen. There was something at once terribly and tenderly familiar to at least One in those sounds.