Above, the two in the plane of sunshine and freer air rode along the brink of the Overhang.
“Say!” Dick said jerkily. “Let’s not go to Lamberton – not direct.”
“What?”
There was a sharp note in her voice. She turned in her saddle to face him. Her gaze narrowed. Was there after all a doubt in the very depths of Nell’s soul about the man?
“I know a fine place – better hotel than at Lamberton – really a nice place to stop. We can reach it before night. Hoskins. You know?”
He still spoke nervously. Nell’s gaze no more left his face. She said evenly, as though her mind was quite placid again:
“There’s no parson at Hoskins, either.”
He darted her another side-glance. How was she taking it? Was she, after all, going to be “sensible?” Nell was seventeen, but a woman grown.
“Shucks, honey,” Dick said, putting out a hand to touch her for the first time. “We’ll ride on and find a parson later. We’re in no rush. We’re out for a grand, good time – ”
She pulled her horse across the path with a fierce jerk of the bridle-rein, and so escaped the defilement of his touch. Her right hand clutched the handle of her quirt, the knuckles bone-white.
“Do you mean – you won’t marry me?”
Dick smiled his most disarming smile, his brown eyes even twinkled. That frank and humorous look was what had first won his advantage with Nell Blossom.
“Shucks, honey,” he drawled again. “Why so serious? Don’t worry about that. I’m free to confess I’m not a marrying man. Seen too much trouble for both parties when they are tied to one another with any silly string of the law. It’s love that will hold us together.”
“That’s heathen, Dick!” she exclaimed hotly. “Just as heathen as Canyon Pass.”
“Nonsense!” He laughed. “You’re just as safe with me, whether we’re married or not.”
Which might have been quite true, but Nell stared at him, her expression as inscrutable as his own when he worked behind the green table. Dick the Devil was a shrewd gambler, but Nell Blossom had played poker herself ever since she could read the pips on the cards. And she had been fighting her own battles in harsh environment and against men almost from the same tender age. Her cold rage now sprang from the fact that he should so mistake her character.
“Come on, honey!” he said coaxingly.
The quirt came up slowly; then it sang through the air.
“You dog, you! Dick the Devil is your true name! And I thought – ”
The man, shouting an oath, dragged his mount backward. The lash descended, missed his handsome face, but seared the horse across its neck.
Squealing, the animal leaped to one side – to the verge of the out-thrust lip of the Overhang. The gambler wheeled him again, seeking to save himself.
“Do you want to murder me – you wildcat!” he cried angrily.
There was a sudden crack, like the slapping of one board upon another. Between the plunging horse and the girl a gap yawned in the earth. Frost, the early rains, or perhaps time itself, had weakened this bit of the Overhang. A patch no larger than a good-sized dining table broke away and slid outward.
The scrambling, wild-eyed horse and the shrieking, white-faced man disappeared with it. The girl held in her own mount with a firm hand. The flare of insane anger faded from her blue eyes. But her countenance settled into a harsh and unlovely expression.
Yet she slipped down from her saddle, quieted her horse with a word, and stepped recklessly to the crumbling edge, trying to see down the face of the cliff.
She could mark no trace of horse or rider. She could no longer hear the rumble of the falling débris. An icy horror gripped her. He was gone!
Finally she drew back from the brink. She looked about at the landscape, but there was not a human being to be seen. She slowly mounted her horse again.
Something besides a terrible disaster had happened here at the brink of the Overhang. Something had happened to Nell Blossom so great, so soul-racking, that she would never be altogether the same girl again. It is a dreadful thing for one so young to find its love-idol shattered.
After a little Nell started her mount, but she did not ride back toward Canyon Pass.
CHAPTER II – DISCONTENT AT DITSON CORNERS
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt read twice these closing words of the long letter.
… and so, my dear Willie, to use your own way of expressing it, I am steering straight for the devil – and enjoying the trip immensely.
Wishing you were with me, Willie, I am, even after your rather bitter castigation,
He laid the missive on his desk with a full-bosomed sigh. Nor was that sigh wholly because of the reprobate Joe. Joe’s flowers of speech did not much ruffle the parson’s spirit.
Joe Hurley might be gay, irresponsible, reckless, even downright wicked; but he never could fail to be kind. Two years of close contact with the blithe Westerner – those final two years at college before Hunt went to the divinity school – had assured the latter that Joe Hurley owned a heart of gold. The gold might be tarnished, but it was true metal nevertheless.
Hunt’s mental picture of his college friend, and never had scholastic friendship been more astounding, could not include any great blemish of later-developed character. It was five years since they had seen each other. Those five years could not have made of Joe Hurley the “roughneck” that he intimated he had become. That was Joe’s penchant for painting with a wide brush.
The reputation the Westerner had left behind him at college when he was requested by a horrified governing board to depart for the sake of the general welfare of the undergraduate body, revealed Joe’s character unequivocally.
When Joe had been “bounced” by the faculty he had celebrated the occasion by giving a farewell banquet at one of the shadiest hotels in the college town, to the wildest crowd of students he could get together. On his own part Joe had dressed in full cowboy regalia, and as the apex of the evening’s entertainment he had “shot up” the banquet room, paying the bill for damages the next morning with a cheerful smile.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt remembered the occasion now with a little shiver of apprehension. Suppose the people of Ditson Corners should ever learn that he, their pastor, had been one of that company who had helped Joe Hurley celebrate his dismissal from scholastic halls!
Joe’s father, a cattleman, had left him a considerable fortune. Joe had invested much of it in a certain mining claim called the Great Hope, for the young fellow had been keen enough to see that the day of the small cattleman was gone. The mine was paying a comfortable income with the promise of doing more than that in the future, so Joe wrote. But he wrote more – much more that was exceedingly interesting to Hunt in his present discontented state of mind.
He picked up the letter again to re-read a part of the third page, this broken sentence first meeting his envious eye:
… and if ever there was a peach, she surely is one, Willie. Golden-brown hair, big blue eyes, and a voice – Say! No songbird ever had anything on Nell. If you once saw her and heard her sing, you’d go crazy about her, old sobersides. All Canyon Pass – I mean the men-folks – are at her feet again, now she has returned to town and is singing in Colorado Brown’s cabaret. Sounds sort of devilish and horrid, doesn’t it, Willie? Believe me, Nell Blossom is some girl. But wild – say! You can’t get near her. She’s got a laugh that plays the deuce with a man’s heart strings – accelerates the pit-a-pat of the cardiac nerve to top-notch and then some! She’s got us all