The Padre nodded while he bent over the breech of his Winchester. He had no wish for Buck to see the smile his words had conjured.
Buck swung his saddle on to his shoulder and passed out of the hut in the direction of the building he had converted into a barn. And when he had gone the Padre looked after him.
“He says she’s handsome, with red-gold hair and blue eyes,” he murmured. Then a far-away look stole into his steady eyes, and their stare fixed itself upon the doorway of the barn through which Buck had just vanished. “Curious,” he muttered. “They’ve nicknamed her ‘Golden,’ which happened to be a nickname—her father gave her.”
He stood for some moments lost in thought. Then, suddenly pulling himself together, he shouldered his rifle and disappeared into the woods.
CHAPTER XIV
A WHIRLWIND VISIT
Joan was idling dispiritedly over her breakfast. A long, wakeful night had at last ended in the usual aching head and eyes ringed with shadows. She felt dreary, and looked forward drearily to inspecting her farm—which, in her normal state, would have inspired nothing but perfect delight—with something like apprehension.
Her beginning in the new life had been swamped in a series of disastrous events which left her convinced of the impossibility of escape from the painful shadow of the past. All night her brain had been whirling in a perfect chaos of thought as she reviewed her advent to the farm. There had been nothing, from her point of view, but disaster upon disaster. First her arrival. Then—why, then the “luck” of the gold find. In her eyes, what was that but the threat of disaster to come? Had not her aunt told her that this extraordinary luck that she must ever bring was part of the curse shadowing her life? Then the coincidence of her nickname. It was truly hideous. The very incongruity of it made it seem the most terrible disaster of all. Surely, more than anything else, it pointed the hand of Fate. It was her father’s nickname for her, and he—he had been the worst sufferer at her hands.