But Joe only shook off her grip, saying, hoarsely:
"I'm going down the Sage Brush. If you ever want me again, you'll find me beyond the blowout."
The word struck like a blow. For three years Jerry had not heard it spoken. It was the one term forever dropped from her vocabulary. All who loved her must forget its very existence.
There was a sudden dead calm in the hot yellow air; a moment of gathering forces before the storm would burst upon the town.
"If you ever see me beyond that blowout, you'll know that I do want you," Jerry said, slowly.
In the blue lightning glare that followed, her white face and big dark eyes recalled to Joe Thomson's mind the moment, so long ago now, it seemed, when Jerry had first looked out at the desert from under the bough of the oak-grove.
During the prolonged, terrific burst of thunder that followed, the young ranchman strode away and the darkness swallowed his stalwart form as the worst storm the Sage Brush country had ever known broke furiously upon the whole valley.
And out on the porch steps stood a girl conscious, not of the storm-wind, nor the beating rain, nor cleaving lightning; conscious only that something had suddenly gone out of her life into the blackness whither Joe Thomson had gone; and with the heartache of the loss of the moment was a strange resentment toward a brave-hearted little Norwegian girl—a harvest-hand with a crippled brother, an adopted baby, and a university education.