“That hair!”
“I know it’s—”
“I don’t care what you know. Untie that knot!”
She obeyed. A red gold flood rippled suddenly almost to her knees.
Carrigan blinked.
“Sit down!”
She dropped to a chair, and Carrigan commenced to work. When a man has to do anything from roping a steer to jerking out a six-gun with the speed of light, he acquires a marvelous dexterity with his hands. Carrigan could almost think with his fingers. They seemed, in fact, to have a separate intelligence.
He gathered up the silken mass. The soft touch thrilled him as if every one of the delicate threads carried a tiny charge of electricity. It was marvelous that such a shining torrent could have been reduced the moment before to that compacted, bright red knot.
Carrigan closed his eyes and summoned up a vision of hair as he had seen it dressed, not on the heads of any of the mountain-desert belles, but in magazine pictures.
With that vision before him he commenced to work, rapidly, surely. It seemed as if the hair, glad to escape from the bondage of that hard knot, fell of its own accord into graceful, waving lines. It curved low across the broad forehead: it gathered at the nape of the neck in a soft knot in the Grecian mode.