“I was not aware that I, at least, was acting the fool,” she retorted, with a washed-out primness.
“Oh, I can’t fight the air, and I’m not going to try. What I’ve got to say, I prefer to say straight from the shoulder. I’m sick of this standing off and giving each other the bad eye over nothing. If we’re going to stay on the same ranch, we might as well be friends. What do you say?”
For a time he thought she was not going to say anything. She was staring at the dust-cloud ahead, and chewing absently at the corner of her under lip, and she kept it up so long that Good Indian began to scowl and call himself unseemly names for making any overture whatever. But, just as he turned toward her with lips half opened for a bitter sentence, he saw a dimple appear in the cheek next to him, and held back the words.
“You told me you didn’t like me,” she reminded, looking at him briefly, and afterward fumbling her reins. “You can’t expect a girl—”
“I suppose you don’t remember coming up to me that first night, and calling me names, and telling me how you hated me, and—and winding up by pinching me?” he insinuated with hypocritical reproach, and felt of his arm. “If you could see the mark—” he hinted shamelessly.
Evadna replied by pushing up her sleeve and displaying a scratch at least an inch in length, and still roughened and red. “I suppose you don’t remember trying to murder me?” she inquired, sweetly triumphant. “If you could shoot as well as Jack, I’d have been killed very likely. And you’d be in jail this minute,” she added, with virtuous solemnity.
“But you’re not killed, and I’m not in jail.”
“And I haven’t told a living soul about it—not even Aunt Phoebe,” Evadna remarked, still painfully virtuous. “If I had—”
“She’d have wondered, maybe, what you were doing away down there in the middle of the night,” Good Indian finished. “I didn’t tell a soul, either, for that matter.”
They left the meadowland and the broad stretch of barren sand and sage, and followed, at a leisurely pace, the winding of the trail through the scarred desolation where the earth had been washed for gold. Evadna stared absently at the network of deep gashes, evidently meditating very seriously. Finally she turned to Grant with an honest impulse of friendliness.
“Well, I’m sure I’m willing to bury the tomahawk—er—that is, I mean—” She blushed hotly at the slip, and stammered incoherently.
“Never mind.” His eyes laughed at her confusion. “I’m not as bad as all that; it doesn’t hurt my feelings to have tomahawks mentioned in my presence.”
Her cheeks grew redder, if that were possible, but she made no attempt to finish what she had started to say.
Good Indian rode silent, watching her unobtrusively and wishing he knew how to bring the conversation by the most undeviating path to a certain much-desired conclusion. After all, she was not a wild thing, but a human being, and he hesitated. In dealing with men, he had but one method, which was to go straight to the point regardless of consequences. So he half turned in the saddle and rode with one foot free of the stirrup that he might face her squarely.
“You say you’re willing to bury the tomahawk; do you mean it?” His eyes sought hers, and when they met her glance held it in spite of her blushes, which indeed puzzled him. But she did not answer immediately, and so he repeated the question.
“Do you mean that? We’ve been digging into each other pretty industriously, and saying how we hate each other—but are you willing to drop it and be friends? It’s for you to say—and you’ve got to say it now.”
Evadna hung up her head at that. “Are you in the habit of laying down the law to everyone who will permit it?” she evaded.
“Am I to take it for granted you meant what you said?” He stuck stubbornly to the main issue. “Girls seem to have a way of saying things, whether they mean anything or not. Did you?”
“Did I what?” She was wide-eyed innocence again.
Good Indian muttered something profane, and kicked his horse in the ribs. When it had taken no more than two leaps forward, however, he pulled it down to a walk again, and his eyes boded ill for the misguided person who goaded him further. He glanced at the girl sharply.
“This thing has got to be settled right now, without any more fooling or beating about the bush,” he said—and he said it so quietly that she could scarcely be blamed for not realizing what lay beneath. She was beginning to recover her spirits and her composure, and her whole attitude had become demurely impish.
“Settle it then, why don’t you?” she taunted sweetly. “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea what there is to settle—in that solemn manner. I only know we’re a mile behind the others, and Miss Georgie will be wondering—”
“You say I’m to settle it, the way I want it settled?”
If Evadna did not intend anything serious, she certainly was a fool not to read aright his ominously calm tone and his tensely quiet manner. She must have had some experience in coquetry, but it is very likely that she had never met a man just like this one. At all events, she tilted her blonde head, smiled at him daringly, and then made a little grimace meant to signify her defiance of him and his unwarranted earnestness.
Good Indian leaned unexpectedly, caught her in his arms, and kissed her three times upon her teasing, smiling mouth, and while she was gasping for words to voice her amazement he drew back his head, and gazed sternly into her frightened eyes.
“You can’t play with me,” he muttered savagely, and kissed her again. “This is how I settle it. You’ve made me want you for mine. It’s got to be love or—hate now. There isn’t anything between, for me and you.” His eyes passed hungrily from her quivering lips to her eyes, and the glow within his own made her breath come faster. She struggled weakly to free herself, and his clasp only tightened jealously.
“If you had hated me, you wouldn’t have stopped back there, and spoken to me,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “Women like to play with love, I think. But you can’t play with me. I want you. And I’m going to have you. Unless you hate me. But you don’t. I’d stake my life on it.” And he kissed her again.
Evadna reached up, felt for her hat, and began pulling it straight, and Good Indian, recalled to himself by the action, released her with manifest reluctance. He felt then that he ought never to let her go out of his arms; it was the only way, it seemed to him, that he could be sure of her. Evadna found words to express her thoughts, and her thoughts were as wholly conventional as was the impulse to straighten her hat.
“We’ve only known each other a week!” she cried tremulously, while her gloved fingers felt inquiringly for loosened hairpins. “You’ve no right—you’re perfectly horrid! You take everything for granted—”
Good Indian laughed at her, a laugh of pure, elemental joy in life and in love.
“A man’s heart does not beat by the calendar. Nature made the heart to beat with love, ages before man measured time, and prattled of hours and days and weeks,” he retorted. “I’m not the same man I was a week ago. Nor an hour ago. What does it matter, I am—the man I am now.” He looked at her more calmly. “An hour ago,” he pointed out, “I didn’t dream I should kiss you. Nor you, that you would let me do it.”
“I didn’t! I couldn’t help myself. You—oh, I never saw such a—a brute!” The tears in her eyes were, perhaps, tears of rage at the swiftness with which he had mastered the situation and turned it in a breath from the safe channel of petty argument. She struck Huckleberry a blow with her whip which sent that astonished animal galloping down the slope before them, his ears laid back and his white eyelashes blinking resentment against the