Whether or not the girl reciprocated his affection a characteristic lack of vanity precluded his knowing, for as yet there had been no love passages between them to warrant his believing so. He thought she liked, and was not altogether indifferent to him, and that was all.
It is not to be supposed that he was entirely alone in his attentions to that debonair young woman. Her sex were not over numerous in the neighborhood, and she was therefore distinctly attractive to the various bachelors—young, middle-aged, and old—who resided within a twenty-mile radius of the Trainors’ establishment. Thus it may be inferred that she did not lack suitors, many of them admittedly eligible as regards their possession of worldly goods—a fact which Ellis forcibly realized at times, when the bitter consciousness of his own limited means and prospects would come home to him with cruel intensity.
But the strong, sane, logical mind of the man predominated, and he kept himself well in hand. They had the prior right, he argued; for, plain and homely though most of them might be, they didn’t hang fire like him, anyway. They were in the position to give the girl a better home than he could ever hope to offer her. He would therefore be no “dog-in-the-manger” to stand in their way, he decided. So, whenever he chanced to find one of these would-be suitors ahead of him in the field, he always promptly excused himself and withdrew; which policy of self-effacement, be it remarked, piqued poor Mary not a little.
He was not exactly made of the stuff that calculating, luke-warm, cautious lovers are prone to be composed of, but the fires of jealousy had once scorched him pretty severely and the memory of the lively torment that he had endured in those miserable days was still too vivid in his recollection to risk a possible repetition of that dread disease.
He need have had no fear. One and all—irrespective of age, wealth, or appearance, she treated them with the same laughing impartiality, rendering to each the same answer. In kindly fashion at that, too, for she realized only as a dowerless spinster can, that the well-meaning, earnest love of an honest man is not a thing to be contemptuously cast aside or scoffed at. As often as not Ellis, nearing the Trainors’ ranch, with the intention of paying a visit, would chance to observe one of these rejected, love-lorn swains galloping or driving away in eccentric haste; and, hopelessly in love though he himself was, that fact did not, however, totally eclipse his sense of humor.
He was only human, and the sight of a discomfitted rival beating an ignominious retreat—or as he (Ellis) put it—“chasing himself over the bald-headed,” was too irresistibly funny a spectacle to prevent a surly chuckle escaping him. And, postponing his intended visit just then, from motives of delicacy, he would ride on his way, in all probability, rejoicing.
CHAPTER XVIII
She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse:
—Othello: Act I, Sc. 3
One glorious September afternoon, appreciating the girl’s fondness for riding Johnny, Ellis rode over to the Trainors’, leading his favorite mount. Entering the house, he received the usual kindly welcome from the rancher and his wife; the latter a stoutish, jolly-looking woman with a great mass of fair, fluffy hair—some years her husband’s junior.
“Well, well,” she said, looking up at him with playful amusement. “And where, sir, have you been hiding yourself lately? We’d begun to think you must have fallen down a gopher hole or something.”