Alice gazed upon him with steady eyes, but her bosom rose and fell with the emotion which filled her heart. She debated calling for Mrs. Adams, but there was something in the droop of the outlaw’s head, in the tone of his voice, which arrested her. However sudden and frenzied his admiration might seem to others, it was sincere and manly, of that she was persuaded. Nevertheless, she was deeply perturbed.
“I wish you would go,” she entreated at last, huskily. “I don’t want to see you taken. You have made yourself a criminal and I ought not to find excuses for you, but I do. You’re so young. It doesn’t seem as if you knew what you were doing. Why don’t you ride away into the wild north country and begin a new life somewhere? Can’t you escape to Canada?”
He seized eagerly upon her suggestion. “Will you write to me if I do?”
“No, I cannot promise that.”
“Why can’t I play the ranger here and wait upon you till the men return?”
“Because Professor Ward read that placard with me. He will know you instantly. I wish you’d go. Gage may come at any moment now.”
Peggy came in with a disturbed look. “It looks like rain,” she announced; “the clouds are settling down all over the peaks.”
The outlaw sprang up and went to the door. “It looked bad when I got up,” he said, as he studied the sky. “I guess we’re in for trouble. It may be snow.”
His fears were soon realized. Rain began to fall in a thin drizzle, and at four o’clock the first faint flakes of snow began to flash amid the gray veils of the water-drops. The women looked at each other in alarm as the cabin’s interior darkened with the ominous shadow of the storm.
“I don’t like this a bit,” said Peggy, after a while. “This is no mountain squall. I wish the men were here.”