In itself the statement was harmless; but it brought to the minds of all the long-standing question in Yellow Hill concerning Dave and Lola and Eve. In the moment of dead silence Steve saw his mistake and was practically paralyzed. He turned a dull red. It was Eve, herself flushed, who bridged the strained scene.
"That's soon settled," said she coolly. "Let Lola come home with me tonight."
"I would like that," replied Lola, dark eyes shining across at Eve.
Cal Steele gave the group a short flickering smile. "Goodnight to you all. I have had the evening of my life. And until we meet again—bless you, my children."
Denver was plainly worried, and he started after Steele. "Sure you don't want help, Cal?"
But Cal Steele shook his head. "Dave, old man, if I did I'd come to you first of all." The inner strain of his thoughts aged him; he stared at Denver like a man racked and wrung. "Just remember that. I'd always come to you first—and last. So long."
He disappeared, leaving behind the hint of trouble. Some of the sparkle went from the party, and by common consent they slowly paid their farewells and walked from the hall. Denver put Eve and Lola in his rig and went over to intercept Steve. "Listen, when you leave Debbie home, why not cut around by the rock road to the ranch? Just to see if anything's on the wing?"
"Can do," grunted Steve.
Dave hurried back and found his foreman, Lyle Bonnet, loitering in the stag line. "Pick up what boys you find from the outfit," he told Bonnet, "and take the straight tail to Starlight. If you hear anything, have a look. Now, hustle."
He returned to the buggy, spread the robes around Lola and Eve, and silently aimed for the Leverage ranch. In the course of the ride he hardly spoke a dozen words, wrapped as he was in uneasy thought. At the Leverage house he helped them down and turned the buggy about. They stood on the porch a moment, the fair, clear-minded, and boyish Eve beside Lola, who seemed to him so often all fire and flame. It struck him queerly that these two, opposites in character, should tonight be sharing the same house. Eve's drowsy, practical, "Goodnight, Dave, go home and get some sleep," made a pleasant melody in the night. Lola only said, "Goodnight," in a slow whisper, but somehow it was in Dave's ear all the way across the yard. In the main road he put the horse to an urgent pace, the thought of Cal Steele's drawn face troubling him.
Eve lighted a lamp and showed Lola to the guest room. "Sleep as late as you please. I'll take you to town in the morning. We've had a splendid evening, haven't we?"
Lola's dark eyes glowed. "Tonight you smoothed over the hard truth, and I admired you more than ever I thought I would." She threw back her head and acted out Steve's unfortunate sentence. "'Well, you've got two girls now, Dave. What are you going to do with them?' But David could not answer it if he wanted. He doesn't know. Neither do you, nor I."
Eve seemed a little pale and tired. "I have been wanting to ask you something for a long while. Did you find the three years' absence to help any? With David?"
"Why?"
Eve answered slowly. "If I thought my leaving for a time would make any difference I'd go tomorrow."
"And come back on the next train for fear of losing," said Lola. "I know."
"What would you do to please him?" asked Eve.
"You see me standing here. I could be a thousand pleasanter places. There is your answer. I would go any place for him, do anything. Do you understand that?"
Eve's body stiffened. The message in Lola's eyes, the blaze of feeling repelled her. Lola laughed softly. "You wouldn't, would you? You want to be discreet. You are afraid. You want things without paying for them."
"That is not love," said Eve quickly.
"Not your kind. But it is my kind. Love is everything. Like fire, like torture, like thirst. You must be half a savage to know it. I'm half a savage. You're not."
"But it isn't love," repeated Eve, biting her lip.
"Not your kind," said Lola, a trace of scorn in her words. "Let me tell you. David Denver is too strong a man to be held completely by any one woman. He is kind, yet when the black mood is on him he could double up his fist and destroy. He speaks softly, yet always with a fire burning deep down in him. He will never be happy, he will never find all that he wants in any one woman. Yet my kind can hold him—for a little while. What I must do to have him—that I'll do. But never, never will it be enough. I throw myself away gladly. And in the end he will destroy me. That is love. You know nothing about it. Go East, where you won't be hurt."
"You don't know him at all," said Eve.
Lola's mood changed on the instant. "Of course I don't. If I knew him—I could have him! You—what do you know that I don't? Tell me that!"
"Isn't it a little late for us to be talking so?" asked Eve.
"You are very calm and very wise, aren't you? You are one thing—I am another. Perhaps if both of our natures were in one woman Dave would puzzle himself no longer."
"Sometimes," said Eve with a shadow on her face, "I think I am two women—and one of them is like you, but never able to come out and be seen. Goodnight."
Denver drove the buggy across his yard and unhitched, throwing the horse into a corral. Lyle Bonnet came off the main house porch.
"No developments?" asked Dave.
"Nothin'," said Bonnet, sleepy-voiced. "There was a few shots beyond Starlight about an hour ago. But I'd say it was some galoot comin' home from the dance."
"I suppose," agreed Dave. "You better turn in."
As for himself, he crossed through the main room and settled down on the south porch of the house. From this vantage point he could, on a clear day, look down the sweep of Starlight canyon and on into the open prairie for thirty miles or more. He liked to sit here and feel that he was for a while above the heat of the world. It gave him a sense of peace. But tonight he could not summon back that peace. Cal Steele's face, strangely distorted, kept rising before him. Yellow Hill was going to war, no doubt of it. Riders were in the night and man's hand was set against man's hand. Jake Leverage had not been at the dance, nor had Lou Redmain. These men were busy elsewhere. And behind them were many riders on the hunt.
"So it will be," he muttered. "And how long will I be able to stay up here and mind my affairs? God knows. I despise posses about as much as I despise outlaws. Who is to say whether the hunted is so much blacker than the man hunting? Let every man stand responsible for his acts, and let every man fight his own fights. Yet that is something soon enough impossible to do. Then what?"
Starlight throbbed with weaving, swirling shadows; the sky was hidden behind the fog mist. The country seemed to lie uneasy. Denver, who responded quickly to the primitive moods of the earth, felt the shift and change as if the temperature had dropped twenty degrees.
"I will fight my own fights," he said to himself. "No matter whom it puts me against. I don't want to go against Redmain, but if it must be then it shall be. All I ask—"
He stiffened and turned his head slightly to the wind. Above the slow rustle of the night emerged a foreign disturbance. It came from the upper trail—a tentative, cautious advance of a horse. Denver slid his feet quietly beneath him, rose, and slipped into the house. He dimmed the lamp and went out to the yard, going on to the vague bulk of a pine trunk. There was a rider just above the place; and that rider seemed to be turning with considerable hesitation from one angle of the slope to another. Denver waited patiently.
Then the horse stopped, but from the shadows came a weird sobbing noise that shot a chill along Denver's nerves. He left the tree and challenged. "Who's there?"
A trembling reply came back. "Dave—oh, Dave—!"
"Cal!" shouted Denver, racing forward.
"Dave, my God, I'm shot to ribbons!"
Denver reached the horse as his friend started slipping