Evadna sat down in the rocker, thrust her two little feet out so that the toe, of her shoes showed close together beyond the hem of her riding-skirt, laid her gauntleted palms upon the arms of the chair and rocked methodically, and looked at Grant and then at Miss Georgie, and afterward tilted up her chin and smiled superciliously at an insurance company’s latest offering to the public in the way of a calendar two feet long.
“When did you come up?” Good Indian asked her, trying so hard to keep a placating note out of his voice that he made himself sound apologetic.
“Oh—about an hour ago, I think,” Evadna drawled sweetly—the sweet tones which always mean trouble, when employed by a woman.
Good Indian bit his lip, got up, and threw his cigarette out of the window, and looked at her reproachfully, and felt vaguely that he was misunderstood and most unjustly placed upon the defensive.
“I only came over,” Evadna went on, as sweetly as before, “to say that there’s a package at the store which I can’t very well carry, and I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking it—when you go.”
“I’m going now, if you’re ready,” he told her shortly, and reached for his hat.
Evadna rocked a moment longer, making him wait for her reply. She glanced at Miss Georgie still busy at the telegraph table, gave a little sigh of resignation, and rose with evident reluctance.
“Oh—if you’re really going,” she drawled, and followed him outside.
CHAPTER XVI
“DON’T GET EXCITED!”
Lovers, it would seem, require much less material for a quarrel than persons in a less exalted frame of mind.
Good Indian believed himself very much in love with his Christmas angel, and was very much inclined to let her know it, but at the same time he saw no reason why he should not sit down in Miss Georgie’s rocking-chair, if he liked, and he could not quite bring himself to explain even to Evadna his reason for doing so. It humiliated him even to think of apologizing or explaining, and he was the type of man who resents humiliation more keenly than a direct injury.
As to Evadna, her atmosphere was that of conscious and magnanimous superiority to any feeling so humanly petty as jealousy—which is extremely irritating to anyone who is at all sensitive to atmospheric conditions.
She stopped outside the window long enough to chirp a commonplace sentence or two to Miss Georgie, and to explain just why she couldn’t stay a minute longer. “I told Aunt Phoebe I’d be back to lunch—dinner, I mean—and she’s so upset over those horrible men planted in the orchard—did Grant tell you about it?—that I feel I ought to be with her. And Marie has the toothache again. So I really must go. Good-by—come down whenever you can, won’t you?” She smiled, and she waved a hand, and she held up her riding-skirt daintily as she turned away. “You didn’t say goodby to Georgie,” she reminded Grant, still making use of the chirpy tone. “I hope I am not in any way responsible.”
“I don’t see how you could be,” said Good Indian calmly; and that, for some reason, seemed to intensify the atmosphere with which Evadna chose to surround herself.
She led Huckleberry up beside the store platform without giving Grant a chance to help, mounted, and started on while he was in after the package—a roll not more than eight inches long, and weighing at least four ounces, which brought an ironical smile to his lips. But she could not hope to outrun him on Huckleberry, even when Huckleberry’s nose was turned toward home, and he therefore came clattering up before she had passed the straggling outpost of rusty tin cans which marked, by implication, the boundary line between Hartley and the sagebrush waste surrounding it.
“You seem to be in a good deal of a hurry,” Good Indian observed.
“Not particularly,” she replied, still chirpy as to tone and supercilious as to her manner.
It would be foolish to repeat all that was said during that ride home, because so much meaning was conveyed in tones and glances and in staring straight ahead and saying nothing. They were sparring politely before they were over the brow of the hill behind the town; they were indulging in veiled sarcasm—which came rapidly out from behind the veil and grew sharp and bitter—before they started down the dusty grade; they were not saying anything at all when they rounded the Point o’ Rocks and held their horses rigidly back from racing home, as was their habit, and when they dismounted at the stable, they refused to look at each other upon any pretext whatsoever.
Baumberger, in his shirt-sleeves and smoking his big pipe, lounged up from the pasture gate where he had been indolently rubbing the nose of a buckskin two-year-old with an affectionate disposition, and wheezed out the information that it was warm. He got the chance to admire a very stiff pair of shoulders and a neck to match for his answer.
“I wasn’t referring to your manner, m’ son,” he chuckled, after he had watched Good Indian jerk the latigo loose and pull off the saddle, showing the wet imprint of it on Keno’s hide. “I wish the weather was as cool!”
Good Indian half turned with the saddle in his hands, and slapped it down upon its side so close to Baumberger that he took a hasty step backward, seized Keno’s dragging bridle-reins, and started for the stable. Baumberger happened to be in the way, and he backed again, more hastily than before, to avoid being run over.
“Snow blind?” he interrogated, forcing a chuckle which had more the sound of a growl.
Good Indian stopped in the doorway, slipped off the bridle, gave Keno a hint by slapping him lightly on the rump, and when the horse had gone on into the cool shade of the stable, and taking his place in his stall, began hungrily nosing the hay in his manger, he came back to unsaddle Huckleberry, who was nodding sleepily with his under lip sagging much like Baumberger’s while he waited. That gentleman seemed to be once more obstructing the path of Good Indian. He dodged back as Grant brushed past him.
“By the great immortal Jehosaphat!” swore Baumberger, with an ugly leer in his eyes, “I never knew before that I was so small I couldn’t be seen with the naked eye!”
“You’re so small in my estimation that a molecule would look like a hay-stack alongside you!” Good Indian lifted the skirt of Evadna’s side-saddle, and proceeded calmly to loosen the cinch. His forehead smoothed a trifle, as if that one sentence had relieved him of some of his bottled bitterness.
“You ain’t shrunk up none—in your estimation,” Baumberger forgot his pose of tolerant good nature to say. His heavy jaw trembled as if he had been overtaken with a brief attack of palsy; so also did the hand which replaced his pipe between his loosely quivering lips. “That little yellow-haired witch must have given yuh the cold shoulder; but you needn’t take it out on me. Had a quarrel?” He painstakingly brushed some ashes from his sleeve, once more the wheezing, chuckling fat man who never takes anything very seriously.
“Did you ever try minding your own business?” Grant inquired with much politeness of tone.
“We-e-ell, yuh see, m’ son, it’s my business to mind other people’s business!” He chuckled at what he evidently considered a witty retort. “I’ve been pouring oil on the troubled waters all forenoon—maybe I’ve kinda got the habit.”
“Only you’re pouring it on a fire this time.”
“That dangerous, yuh mean?”
“You’re liable to start a conflagration you can’t stop, and that may consume yourself, is all.”
“Say, they sure do teach pretty talk in them colleges!” he purred, grinning loosely, his own speech purposely uncouth.
Good Indian turned upon him, stopped as quickly, and let his anger vent itself in a sneer. It had occurred to him that Baumberger was not goading him without purpose—because Baumberger