“Hawk hop out and the crow hop in,
Three hands round and go it ag’in.
Allemane left, back to the missus,
Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses.”
He rushed from the room and down to the stable. At sight of him some one leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.
“Who was that?” asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.
“That was—” and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.
Texas cursed long and picturesquely. Then he went back to the bunk-room and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take offence.
Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him. All that evening he had been waiting anxiously for Judith. Meanwhile he had used all his influence as a newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe the ruffled feelings of the cattle-men. Of the tragedy in the valley he had heard no rumor.
Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the Récamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and ordinary. In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit. His acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the turning of the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were more disturbing. She had never told Peter of that strange woodland meeting with Judith, yet Judith’s beauty, her probable hold over Peter, the degree of his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty’s consciousness. In the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her head completely for so old a campaigner. She drew the apron-string tight—attempted force instead of strategy.
Kitty and Peter finished their waltz, one of the few round dances of the evening.
“How perfectly you dance, Kitty! It’s a long time since we’ve had a waltz together.”
The cow-punchers looked at Kitty as if she were not quite flesh and blood. Such flaxen daintiness, femininty etherealized to angelic perfection, was new to them, but their admiration was like that given to a delicate exotic which, wonderful as it is, one is well pleased to view through the glass of the florist’s window.