From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in between.
"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.
"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away off down there run the Kiamichi—you will have to take my word for it, you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the Territory come together, is off that way, too."
The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering, and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"
"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell upon her.
"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers, and pleading with them.
"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she was confidential, but a little remote.
Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him. To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege. The force of his self-conflict took all the colour from his lips, all the light from his eyes. "My God! My God!" he cried, a short, sharp cry, that beat up the Tigmores and broke and splintered into the big loneliness futilely. Then he jerked his horse about abruptly. "We must go back now," he said.
But the girl, who had been watching, turned her eyes from him and held her horse still for a short moment. The glory of the hills came on across the wide park to her and enfolded her, met in kind by the radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large, impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father. She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his face, his voice. And even while her heart filled and quivered with knowing it, some higher power of divination made her know, too, that he was caught between his love of her and his difficulty with her father in an inexplicable, soul-shaking way.
When Steering, a few feet below her, turned again towards her, she looked finer, fairer, more immortally young and strong than he had ever seen her look. She rode down to him fearlessly and put her hand out. "Sometimes the thing to do is just to stand steady," she said, "isn't that it?"—bridging all the unspoken thought and feeling between them, understanding, helping.