Her words melted his heart. Dropping on his knees beside her bed, he pressed her fingers to his lips, then rose. “I’ll see you again—somewhere—sometime,” he said, brokenly. “Good-by.”
No sooner had the door closed behind the outlaw than Peggy rose in her place beside Alice and voiced her mystification. “Now what is the meaning of all that?”
“Don’t ask me,” replied the girl. “I don’t feel like talking, and my foot is aching dreadfully. Can’t you get up and bathe it? I hate to ask you—but it hurts me so.”
Peggy sprang up and began to dress, puffing and whistling with desperation. As soon as she was dressed she ran to the door and opened it. All was still, a world of green and white. “The fire is almost out,” she reported, “and I can see Mr. Smith’s horse’s tracks.”
V
It was about ten o’clock when a couple of horsemen suddenly rounded the point of the forest and rode into the clearing. One of them, a slender, elderly man with gray, curly beard and a skin like red leather, dismounted and came slowly to the door, and though his eyes expressed surprise at meeting women in such a place, he was very polite.
“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said, with suave inflection.
“Good morning,” Peggy replied.
“Fine snowy mornin’.”
“It is so.” She was a little irritated by the fixed stare of his round, gray eyes.