I had no smile as I took the reins from her. I had wanted a chance to be alone with her, and I had it: but I knew better than to think she was going to Billy Jones's for the sake of a drive with me. The only real thought I had was that behind me, in the back of the wagon, were the boxes of gold she had marked inexplicably with her blue seal, and that I had heard her say the night before that she "would have to get that gold!"
How she meant to do it was beyond me; and it was folly to think she ever could do it, with six feet of a man's strength beside her. But nevertheless, when you loved a girl for no other earthly reason than that she was your dream of a girl come true, and even though she belonged to another man, it was no thought with which to start on a lonely drive with her. I set my teeth on it and never opened them for a solid mile over the hummocky road through the endless spruce bush, behind which the sun had already sunk. I could feel my dream girl's shoulder where she sat beside me, muffled in a sable-lined coat of Dudley's: and the sweet warmth of her, the faint scent of her gold-bronze hair, made me afraid to speak, even if I had known what I wanted to say.
But suddenly she spoke to me. "Mr. Stretton, you're not angry with me for coming with you?"
"You know I'm not." But I did not know what I was. Any one who has read as far as this will know that if ever a plain, stupid fool walked this world, it was I,—Nicholas Dane Stretton. Put me in the bush, or with horses, and I'm useful enough,—but with men and women I seem to go blind and dumb. I know I never could read a detective story; the clues and complications always made me feel dizzy. I was pretty well dazed where I sat beside that girl I knew I ought to find out about, and her nearness did not help me to ask her ugly questions. If she had not been Dudley's,—but I broke the thought short off. I said to myself impersonally that it was impossible for a girl to do any monkey tricks about the La Chance gold with a man like me. Yet I wondered if she meant to try!
But she showed no sign of it. "I had to come," she said gently. "Marcia really wants Billy Jones's wife: she won't let me wait on her, and of course Charliet can't do it. You believe me, don't you? I didn't come just for a drive with you!"
I believed that well enough, and I nodded.
"Then," said my dream girl quietly, "will you please stop the horses?"
I looked round. We were miles from the mine, around a turn where the spruce bush ceased for a long stretch of swamp,—bare, featureless, and frozen. Then, for the first time, I looked at Dudley's girl that I was fool enough to love.
"What for?" I demanded. "I mean, of course, if you like," for I saw she was white to the lips, though her eyes met mine steadily, like a man's. "Do you mean you want to go back?"
She shook her head almost absently. "No: I think there's something bumping around in the back of the wagon. I"—there was a sharp, nervous catch in her voice—"want to find out what it is."