Eric turned his eyes away.
“I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,” he asked, timidly.
Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the outline of his face, pityingly.
“Well, you might—but you’d lose a good deal else. I shouldn’t like you to go to New York—and be poor, you’d be out of atmosphere, some way,” she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: “There he would be altogether sordid, impossible—a machine who would carry one’s trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it?” “No,” she added aloud, “I shouldn’t like that.”
“Then I not go,” said Eric, decidedly.
Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
“But I’ll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they say you know them all. Won’t you?”
Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his knee.
“Yes, I will,” he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his soul to hell as he said it.
They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret’s pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her pony’s bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.