He turned to decline, but the words died on his lips. The eyes of the girl were stormy; her cheeks flushed. It was plain that for some reason she had set her heart on his winning. Why? His pulses crashed with the swift, tumultuous beating of the red blood in him. Rowan McCoy was not a vain man. It was hard for him to accept the conclusion for which his whole soul longed. But what other reason could there be for her insistence?
During the past few weeks he had been with Ruth Trovillion a great deal. He had ridden with her, climbed Old Baldy by her side, eaten picnic lunches as her companion far up in flower-strewn mountain parks. He had taught her to shoot, to fish, to make camp. They had been gay and wholesome comrades for long summer days. The new and secret thing that had come into his life he had hidden from her as if it had been a sin. The desire of his heart was impossible, he had always told himself. How could it be otherwise? This fine, spirited young creature, upon whom was stamped so ineradicably the look of the thoroughbred, would go back to her own kind when the time came. Meanwhile, let him make the best of his little day of sunshine.
“I told the boys I wasn’t expecting to ride,” he parried. “It has been rather understood that I wouldn’t.”
“But if I ask you?” she demanded.
There was no resisting that low, imperious appeal.
He looked straight into her eyes. “If you ask it, I’ll ride.”
“I do ask it.”
He rose. “It’s your say-so, little partner. I’ll let the committee know.”
The eyes of the girl followed him, a brown, sun-baked man, quiet and strong and resolute. Her glance questioned shyly what manner of man this was, after all, who had imposed himself so greatly upon her thoughts. He was genuine. So much she knew. He did not need the gay trappings of Larry Silcott to brand him a rider of the hills, foursquare to every wind that blew. Behind the curtain of his reticence she had divined some vague hint of a woman in his life. Now a queer little thrill of jealousy, savage and primeval, claimed her for the first time. She knew her own power over Rowan McCoy. It hurt her to feel that another girl had once possessed it, too.
A cow-puncher from Laramie, in yellow wool chaps and a shirt of robin’s-egg blue, took the stage after Silcott. He drew a roan with a red-hot devil of malice in its eye. The bronco hunched itself over to the fence in a series of jarring bucks, and jammed the leg of the rider against a post. The Laramie youth, beside himself with pain, caught at the saddle horn to save his seat. The nearest judge fired a revolver to tell him he was out of the running. He had “touched leather.”