She bit her lip, anger glowing in her eyes. "You deserve to be whipped, Claude!"
He laughed at her; a high, mirthless laugh that rang against the poles and died. "Let anyone hereabouts try it. I'd welcome the exercise. Well, my dear Kit, wish me luck. I'm going to rid you of my unwelcome presence before the week is out. Fact. I imagine you'll feel easier to have me gone."
"Going back East to cadge off your friends again, Claudie?"
"Quite a cruel thrust. I said we were much alike, didn't I? No, I'm not going East. They'll never see me again back there. I'm going—God knows where." The fresh sun flamed through the window and struck his long yellow hair. The girl had a full view of his profile—its hard jaw bones, its over-heavy outline of eyes and forehead. He disappeared without a backward glance, and she heard him ride away.
"If I were a man," she murmured to herself, "I'd give him a fine whipping."
But all marks of anger were erased by the time Gillette returned. She had got into a riding habit, and when she trailed across the yard to the horse that was to be hers she was quite gay and beautiful. Together they cantered east, rising and falling with the swell of the earth; the sun was a blood disk beneath the threat of which the land quivered. The river, sucked into the sands, showed only a rivulet of water. It seemed wholly impossible that man or beast could find sustenance in the expanse of tortured prairie stretching its endless leagues into the smoky horizon; and for all her determination to be a good Spartan, Christine Ballard felt the weight of that searing, oppressive day. It was as if some unseen giant crushed her and blew his breath into her face. Her pleasantries became harder to manage, and at the end of several miles, when he stopped her on a commanding ridge and began to point out the extent of the range, she interrupted. "Tom, it's magnificent. Really it is. But—do you ever feel that you are wasting the best of yourself out here?"
"What's the best of me, Kit?"
"Oh, putting your talents in a place where they'll make you great. Why, Tom, back East you could be splendidly successful. How many of our friends have told me you were able to break through any kind of opposition. You could be in high places."
He drew his arm around the horizon. "I'm humbler than that, Kit. You can't live under this sky, having it as a sort of next- door neighbour all the time, and not lose a lot of pretensions. What good are high places to a man if he's not satisfied? Why fight for something you've got no heart in? And what more could any man want than this? Look at the prairie sweeping off there. It's mine to ride on. I sleep sound at night. I go out in the morning and look at the sun coming up and I feel as if the day was made for me and nobody else. A fellow loses himself and his troubles. Time doesn't count. Everything marches along slow and a man lives slow—which is the way folks ought to live. What's better?"
"Sometimes," said she, "I think it's criminal in a man not to achieve all he is able to achieve."
"For instance?"
"Why, you could go up politically, you could make a fortune of your own choice. Look at my father."
He shook his head. She thought she had never heard him say a more solemn word. "I've gone back to the blanket, Kit. Don't drag out the torture machines again."
It was so definite, so final that she forbore to press him further. And in one of those swift flashes of wisdom she sometimes permitted herself, she saw events marching alon to that last gamble when she would be putting herself up am saying, "Take me on your own terms." The thought should have dispirited her. Yet it was otherwise. A current of emotion bore her along on a flood tide, and with it came a strange pleasure. She who stepped so carefully around the crater of life was on the point of throwing herself willingly into it. She, Christine Ballard!
He had discovered something on the ground that interested him, and they followed it a hundred yards before he spoke again. "Trail. I think it's Blondy's horse. But we'll just have a look."
No more was said for a good while. The hoof prints led them into coulees, over ridges, and through extremely broken pieces of ground. The girl, obedient to his humour, kept her peace, wondering at the watchfulness that came over his face. More than once they galloped away from the trail and into the recesses of a box canon, or detoured below the horizon and crawled slowly to the ridge tops again. Somewhat to the right of them stood a butte, black and forbidding, at which Gillette constantly glanced. And at last Christine ventured a question. "What is it?"
He drew himself from his study. "I'm trying to make up the story in this. There's always some kind of a yarn in a set of hoof prints. And when you see hoof prints mixed with boot prints that story usually promises a suprise ending."
Quite of a sudden his head came up, turning sidewise. She thought she heard a faint sound floating through the morning drone. And again she marked the strange shift of his expression. "Come on," he muttered. His horse raced up a slope, Kit lagging. He stopped an instant on the backbone of the ridge; then she saw him rise in his stirrups and fling the quirt down on the pony's rump. When she rode to the crest he was a hundred yards away.
Directly in his path and another fifty yards to the fore a pair of horses stood idle. Her eyes caught them first; then, as Gillette swerved, she saw two figures locked together, struggling. Gillette was off his horse, sand spurting up beneath his boots, and racing onward. The pair had split; two men in a fight. One of them was Lispenard. Kit galloped ahead.
The other was not a man, but a girl dressed in man's clothing; quite striking of features and at this moment trembling with exhaustion. Certainly it wasn't fear, for her black eyes sparkled with outraged emotion, and she was crying, "You dam' dog! I could kill you! I could!" Then Christine Ballard heard Gillette break in; and there was such a suppressed fury in his words that she felt the stab of an emotion hitherto quite alien—jealousy.
"I am going to whip you, Blondy," he was saying. "It ought to be a gun, but I'll give you your own weapons. Put up your hands, you damned yellow cur! You are going to get a lesson you have needed all your life."
Lispenard's heavy lips pulled back from his teeth; a spotty, purplish colour stood along his cheeks. He was sullen, vindictive. "You fool!" he cried. "I've had enough of your fine manners! I'm weary of 'em, hear me! By heavens, I've sickened on your cursed air of superiority!"
"Put up your hands."
"Don't get on a pedestal for the women!" shouted Lispenard; he flung back his shoulders and the knotted muscles rippled through his shirt. He had never bulked so immense, so destructively powerful as at that moment; he stood half a head over Gillette, he was thicker, more massive in every respect; and as he took a step forward, knees suddenly springing a little under the weight of his body, he seemed like a wild animal from the jungle. "I have always whipped you, my lad! And I'll smash your ribs until you won't walk so upright and almighty—And then I'll take my leave! I'm cursed tired of your ways!"
"Save your breath, Blondy."
The great body went across the interval as if shot from a catapault. Fists struck so swiftly that Christine Ballard couldn't follow them. She screamed, but above the shrillness of it she heard the impact of bodies, the expelling of great breaths, the shuffling of feet in the sand. It was quite impossible that large men could move with that agility; Lispenard's yellow head made a complete circle under the sun; arms feinted, drew back, feinted again and smashed against their targets. Tom sagged, supporting himself on one knee; Lispenard's face blazed with the killer's instinct. "Get up and fight! Always did lack guts! Get up and fight before I kick you to pieces!" Gillette was up. Again Lispenard's great frame snapped across the space. Gillette was off his guard, and he was flung back by a single sledgelike blow. In falling he caught Lispenard's arm and together they sprawled on the ground, rolled, arm wrenching at arm, knees striking like pistons. Body crushed against body. They were on their feet once more and Tom Gillette's face was crimson and his shirt had been ripped from collar to belt.
Lispenard came on, crouching, a strangled cry in his throat. And the rip and smash of flesh so sickened Christine Ballard that she had to support