"I'll do no more exploring," he murmured. "Here we camped and here we stay."
Lispenard, riding glumly alongside, bent an ironic glance at his companion. "What was that subterranean threat?"
"Nothing."
"Aha! The abysmal silences of a strong man. Volcanic emotions beneath an iron mask. Really, Tom, I'm beginning to falter. A set of building blocks would afford me the thrill of a lifetime."
"You'll come out of it, Blondy."
The Blond Giant swore irritably. "Good Lord, don't talk as if I were a kid to be humoured. I'm twenty-one."
"Then act like it," replied Tom. But he followed this by laying a fraternal arm across the man's shoulder. "Just forget that, Blondy. We all get short tempered now and then. Best way is to keep a tight tongue."
Lispenard drew away from Tom's arm and rode along silently. Tom, sweeping the terrain, saw a dust cloud kicking up to the east, and for the next half hour he watched it trail up and down the ridges, coming nearer. Presently the figure of Lorena Wyatt became visible, riding like an Indian. The Blond Giant's whole attitude instantly changed.
"By gad, there's our prairie flower! Tom, for the Lord's sake introduce me—introduce me! Did you ever see so compact a little beauty?"
She drew up and waited until they had approached, her face maintaining a gravity that her black eyes were forever threatening to dispel. She had but one noncommittal glance for Lispenard's sweeping bow and his broad smile. It was to Tom she paid attention.
"I'd like to see you alone a moment," said she.
"Oh, come now," protested Lispenard, "we're blood brothers. Cross my heart if that's not the literal truth. Am I to be denied the sunlight altogether?"
A swift glance flashed between the girl and Tom. She straightened in the saddle and waited; Lispenard tarried, still smiling. "Formal introductions seem to be de trop out in these broad stretches. Who am I to fret over the fact? My lady, you have one more humble servant. Fact..."
"Have you no manners?" interrupted the girl scornfully.
That stopped the Blond Giant and, for all his sunburnt colour, a flush spread over his cheeks. "Manners? Oh, come. Who is there to judge manners out here? This is no drawing room, is it?"
"Most Easterners make that mistake," said she. At which Tom turned to Lispenard and cut off further parley. "Stay here." He and the girl rode along the prairie a hundred yards or so before she came to a halt.
"I've heard. Oh, I'm sorry!"
"Thank you for that."
She hurried on. "I never knew until we got to the river that the two outfits were racing for the same spot. San Saba—he's crooked, he's a born traitor! If I'd had any idea he was with you I'd have warned you."
He turned that over in his head. "Would you have told me even against your father's will?"
Storm swept out of her small body. "I would! I hate crookedness, I won't stand for it. Dad hired him—I don't know why—some years ago. Kept him even after I wanted to fire the man off the ranch. If I had been a man I'd have used a gun on San Saba. He's a snake. There's been things lately that have made me suspect..."
But her sense of honesty came in conflict with an ingrained loyalty, and she stopped a moment, proceeding wistfully. "When I saw you near Ogallala and gave you just my first name, it wasn't—it wasn't because I was trying to conceal anything. I just wanted to tell you that."
Tom shook his head. "You couldn't be crooked."
"How do you know?" she demanded with that characteristic frank curiosity.
The sunlight made a playground of her face, sparkling against the black eyes, losing itself in the dark hair beneath the hat brim and in the hollow of her throat. Most women he knew, looked out of place in riding habits, no matter how fashionable. But this girl, dressed in the roughest of men's clothes, couldn't hide the rounding freshness of her body or the upthrust of vitality that came with every gesture and word.
"I know it," said he.
She appeared suddenly confused and dropped her eyes, whipping her quirt across the saddle skirts. "A woman can ask some foolish things," said she. "That's why I'd like to be a man. Anyhow, I wasn't trying to rope any information out of you."
"We're going to be good neighbours," drawled Tom.
"Just you know it," she said with a lift of her chin. "It's a darn big country to be fighting in. Or—to be lonesome in." She nodded toward Lispenard, who sat moodily in the distance. "Who's that?"
"An old Eastern friend of mine."
She smiled, a frank, sweet smile that seemed to ask pardon. "Then I'm sorry for having been so abrupt with him. I thought at first he was just—just another specimen. There's plenty of them nowadays. Just tell him, though, that manners are always welcome."
"He's got much to learn."
"Haven't we all?" she asked. And the two of them looked at each other until the girl's horse moved restlessly. She raised her small compact shoulders, gathering in the reins. "If ever I hear of San Saba I'll let you know. So-long."
"So-long."
She fled across the uneven ground and disappeared. Tom returned thoughtfully to his companion, and they cruised homeward. Lispenard held his own counsel as long as he could, which was no great length of time:
"Well, what's it all about? What's the secret?"
"Nothing," drawled Tom.
"Oh, by gad! Tommy, I'm truthful when I say this Western taciturnity galls me like the devil! Have you forgotten all the old fraternal confidences?"
Tom Gillette had not meant to reveal the conviction that had matured in his head over the long northern drive. Nevertheless, it slipped out now. "Blondy, the time for that is all behind us. The time and the place as well. Men change—all things change."
"I have sensed as much," replied Lispenard drily. "A severance of diplomatic relations, as it were?"
"No, not at all," said Tom. "Our past four years were years for talking. From now on it is the time to be doing. God knows there's plenty of that ahead."
Lispenard relapsed into one of his sullen spells; his big lips were splayed in a kind of a pout and his whole face mirrored dissatisfaction. At the chuck wagon he abruptly left Tom and had nothing more to do with him all the day. As for Tom, he regretted speaking out as he had done, and he would have made amends—save that he couldn't make headway against the conviction that his one-time friend was in the process of a mighty transformation; that the man's impulses for good and bad—always hitherto more or less evenly matched—were being forged by some kind of internal fire. The dominant traits would triumph, the lesser ones would crumble. Tom was afraid of the result; he had more than once wished Lispenard were back East where the restraints of a more complex social order would take hold.
Quite promptly more important affairs put the man from his mind. Foremost was the matter of getting some legal claim to water rights along the river. Next was to get trace of San Saba. Then cabins and pens were yet to be built against fall and winter. Leaving Quagmire in charge of this last chore, Tom struck out for town, thirty miles north, early next morning. The route led him down the river until he was within Wyatt's new range, then across a ford and over the undulating prairie. By eleven he was at Nelson, seeking out a surveyor.
Nelson was a cattle town on the boom. Along the solitary street ranged a double row of buildings not yet old enough to have lost the sweet, aromatic pine smell, and at the same time old enough to have received a baptism of bullet holes through the battlemented fronts. But one structure boasted paint; and naturally enough this was the saloon. At the end of the street three or four