And without another word he turned and hurried away towards the mouth of the trail whence he had appeared.
CHAPTER XXVII
SUSPENSE
It was nearly sundown. A chilly mist was stealing down the slopes of the surrounding hills. It densified to a ruddy fog as it caught the glow of the evening sun, and finally settled upon the valley. And with each passing moment the hills seemed to recede, their outlines to grow more indistinct and ghostly. And gradually the whole prospect took on the depressing aspect of a day dying wearily.
Had Jessie been less preoccupied as she stood at the door of the ranch-house she might have felt something of all this. But she heeded nothing of the hour, and saw nothing of the picture before her. Her eyes only visualized the scenes that a world of troubled and apprehensive thought yielded her. Her mind and heart were full of a great terror, a terror which left her helpless and dazed.
She stirred restlessly. Time and again she changed her position. Now she was leaning against one casing of the doorway, now against the other. A nervous glance over her shoulder, as some sound in the darkness of the room behind her set her shivering, told of the state of her nerves, as also, with ears ever on the alert, her fearful glances at a definite spot in the rapidly dimming hills told of a straining, harassed expectancy. Her nerves were almost at breaking-point. Her handsome face was drawn and haggard. All the youthful freshness seemed to have vanished from it forever, leaving her radiant eyes shadowed and hopeless. It was a painful change. But the outward and visible signs were nothing to the changes that had taken place within her.
Thirty yards away a decrepit choreman was making pretense of some work upon a corral fence. But it was only pretense. His real occupation was espionage. His red-rimmed eyes never for a moment lost sight of his master’s woman when she showed herself in the open. A curious-looking dog of immense proportions, half mastiff, half Newfoundland, squatted on its haunches at his side, alternating his green-eyed attention between a watchful regard for the hand that fed and thrashed it and the woman at the doorway. There was not much to choose between the faces of these wardens of the ranch. Both were cruel, both were intensely vicious. In neither pair of eyes was there any friendliness for the woman. And it needed little imagination to understand that both possessed to the full all the instincts of the savage watch-dog.
But Jessie had no thought for either. Her own terrible thoughts and feelings held her. It is doubtful if she was even aware of their presence at all. Just now one thought stood out dominant in her mind. She was expecting the return of––James. And the return of James meant––She shuddered.