"Nothing wrong, is there, Bess?" he hesitated. "You're not sick?"
"No, there's nothing wrong," monotonously. "I'm a bit tired, is all."
For a long minute the man said nothing, merely sat there, his black head bare in the starlight, looking up at her. Repressed human that he was, there seemed to him nothing now to say, nothing adequate. Meanwhile the pony was growing more and more impatient. A tiny hoof beat at the
half-frozen ground rhythmically.
"All right, then, Bess," he said at last. "You mustn't sit there in the window. It's getting chilly. Good-night."
The girl drew back until her face was in shadow.
"Good-night," she echoed for the second time, and the shade closed as before.
For five minutes longer the Indian sat as he was, bare of head, motionless; but the light did not return, nor did he hear a sound, and at last he rode slowly out the gate and toward his own quarters.
The place where he lived was exactly a half mile from the Buffalo Butte ranch house, and due north. Originally a one-room shack, grudgingly built according to government requirements to prove up on a homestead, it had recently been enlarged by the addition of a second larger room, and as a whole the place further improved by the building of a sod and weather-board barn. The reason for this was obvious, to one acquainted with the tenant's habits particularly so. Just how long the Indian had remained separate, just why he had first made the change, Landor himself could hardly have told. Suffice it to say it had been for years, and in all that time, even in the coldest weather, the voluntary exile had never lived under a roof. Primitive or evolved as it might be, as youth and as man, the Indian was a tent-dweller. Just now the little house was being fitted up for occupancy, How himself doing it at odd moments of the day and at evenings; but as yet he still lived, as always, under eight by ten feet of canvas near at hand.
A lighted tent stands out very distinctly by contrast against a dark horizon, and almost before he had left the ranch house yard the man on the impatient, mouse-coloured broncho knew that he had company; yet, characteristic in his every action, he did not hurry. Methodically he put up the pony in the new barn, fed and bedded him for the night. From the adjoining stall, out of the darkness, there came a nasal puppyish whine and the protest of a straining chain. Had it been daylight, an observer would have seen a woolly grey ball with a pointed nose and a pair of sharp eyes tugging at the end of that tether; but as it was, two gleaming eyes, very close together, were all that were visible. It was to the owner of these eyes that the man gave the scraps from his lunch remaining in the saddlebag. For it, as for the pony, he made a bed; then—though the little beast was only a grey prairie wolf, it was a baby and lonely—he knelt down and for a moment laid his own face against the other's softly shaggy face.