She stood thinking, thinking, and then a further change came over her. She remembered this man’s work. She remembered his duty. Ought she to feel badly toward him?
And Kate? What of Kate? Would she——What on earth brought him to the valley—now?
It was too late to avoid him now, if she had wanted to. And, somehow, on reflection, she was not sure she did want to. So she stood her ground as he came up.
He reined Peter in as he came abreast, and his dark eyes expressed his surprise at sight of the waiting girl.
“Why—Miss Helen, this——” He broke off abruptly, and, turning in his saddle, looked back over the long, long trail. When his eyes came back to the girl’s face they were smiling. “It’s kind of hot out here,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid of the sun?” Then he became silent altogether, while he interpreted to himself the somewhat stony regard in her eyes.
In a moment something of the awkwardness of the encounter occurred to him. His mind was full of other things, which before he had missed the possibility of.
“I don’t mind the sun, Mr. Fyles,” said Helen coldly. “Besides, I guess I’m not standing around here for—fun. I’m waiting for some one.”
Fyles glanced back over the trail. Then he nodded. “He’s coming along,” he said quietly. “Guess he started out from Amberley before me. Say, he’s a bully feller, sure enough, and I like him. I’ve seen a good deal of him in Amberley. But I guessed he wouldn’t be thanking me for my company on the trail, so I came another way, and passed on ahead. You see—I, well, I had to do my duty—here, and—well, he’s a bully feller, Miss Helen, and—you’ll surely be happy with him.”
While he was talking, just for a moment, a wild impulse stirred Helen to some frigid and hateful retort. But the man’s evident sincerity won the day and the girl’s eyes lit with a radiant smile.
“He’s—on the trail?” she cried, banishing her last shadow of coldness. “He is? Say, tell me where, and when he’ll get in. I—I had this message which said he’d be here by sundown, and—and I thought I’d just come right along and meet him. Have—have you seen him? And—and——”