But Mrs. Trainor outdid her husband in impulsive warmth.
“You threatened to kiss me,” she began archly. “Now, I’m going to do more than threaten. There, sir!”
And, suiting the action to the word, she kissed him heartily. Then, womanlike, as the reaction to her happiness—she began to cry. At which Trainor guffawed and caught hold of her teasingly. But, dragging herself away from him, she pushed Ellis towards the path.
“Now you go!” she sobbed, “after her—straightway. And don’t you dare bring her back here until you’ve kissed her tears away and she’s her own happy self again. That is, if you can find her,” she added, with wet, smiling eyes. “I don’t know exactly which way she went.”
“Oh, I’ll find her, all right,” said Ellis cheerfully. “I think I know where she’ll be.”
And, turning, he strode off to the waiting Johnny, mounted, and set off at a brisk lope towards “Lone Butte,” that reared its head in the hazy distance. For it was there that he guessed instinctively she had betaken herself.
Purposely making a wide detour to escape her possible observation, thirty minutes’ brisk riding brought him into a small coulee, dotted with a young growth of Balm o’ Gilead trees and alder bushes, which lay to the rear of the butte and exactly opposite to the side where the regular path to the summit began. Here he dismounted and, leading Johnny, to save a later descent for that animal, commenced to slowly make the ascent.
Pausing to take breath within a few yards of the top, the breeze brought to his ears the unmistakable sounds of somebody whistling carelessly to herself. Yes, that was her whistle, all right, he reflected; so she couldn’t be so very unhappy. Intending to steal up to her unobserved, and calculating from his memory of the position of the big stone, that she would have her back turned towards him, he crept warily to the summit.
Soon, not thirty feet distant on the small plateau, he beheld her seated on the stone and, as he had surmised, facing the West. But her attitude of dejected abandon sobered him somewhat, and the low, monotonous whistle sounded doleful in the extreme. Noiselessly the Sergeant decreased the distance between them, and when within a few feet halted, not wishing to startle her too badly. On account of her wide-brimmed Stetson hat tipped back on the nape of her neck, and the breeze blowing in her ears, she had not thus far been aware of his close approach, the thick, “old-bottom” prairie grass effectually deadening the ring of Johnny’s steel-shod hoofs.
Long and earnestly, with a great love not unmixed with a pang of remorse in his heart, Ellis gazed on the still unconscious girl. Then all at once he gave a violent start, which almost betrayed his presence to her.