Part 10 (2/2)
Billie watched him until he disappeared down the avenue of flowering trees, then, brus.h.i.+ng her hand across her eyes, she turned and went into the house.
Sallie Bailey looked up with a twinkle from the s.h.i.+rt she was patching.
”Well, carita, did he?” she demanded with much interest.
”Did he what?” Billie paused at the foot of the stairs.
”Did he--say anything?”
”Oh, a heap. I'm going to be a hit in society and forget all my friends and everything down here and roll in that money like a pinto in the pasture. I wish to goodness that I was dead!”
”No, you don't,” Sallie retorted comfortably. ”You're just beginning to take notice, that's all, and so's he. He ain't saddle-broke yet and he's gun-shy, but he'll get used to the report o' that money o' yours in time. Men are a good deal like pintos; some you can coax and some you can bully, but they all of 'em buck at the first gate. Don't you worry your head about Mr. Kearn Thode, honey; wait till the next round-up, and you'll have him roped, tied, and branded before he knows where he's at.”
Billie mounted three steps and halted, her head held high.
”Him?” she queried with infinite scorn. ”I don't want him! Dad asked him to look out for me, you see, and he thinks I'm kind of on his hands, but I'll show him! I'm liable to make some big mistakes, and I reckon that Mrs. Halstead will earn all the money my grandfather left her to teach me the rules of the game, but I'll sit tight and learn if it breaks me and when it comes my turn to play, I'll show them all I'm not a piker, anyway!”
”You wasn't ever that, Billie,” the older woman observed gently, for the girl's hurt heart was on her sleeve. ”I reckon he only meant to be kind.”
”I don't want kindness!” the ungrateful Billie responded savagely. ”I don't want condescension and duty-friends.h.i.+p. I want, I want--oh, I want Dad!”
Limasito was indeed out in full force to speed her on her way the following morning. The news had traveled quickly over the countryside and every style of conveyance, from a mule-team to the latest improved jitney, lined the plaza. White, Mex', and Mongolian, from the richest oil operator to the lowliest peon, her friends had gathered to say farewell.
They stampeded her on the Calle Rivera and unceremoniously held up Mr.
North's impressive car before the hotel, while Jim Baggott, in an ancient silk hat and bibulously primed for the occasion, read an ungrammatical but fervent valediction.
Billie could only throw both hands out to them, laughing and sobbing in one breath as the car moved off down a lane of solidly packed humanity and disappeared in a whirl of dust.
”'S on the house!” Jim Baggott waved toward the bar with one hand and openly wiped his eyes with the other. ”Gonna make a gosh-almighty swell of her, are they? Well, I wish'm luck, but they'll never change her heart or break her spirit. She's our'n, an' she'll come back if I have to go after her myself, so help me! What you-all have?”
True to his word, Kearn Thode had ridden out at daybreak and ridden hard, but only the pinto knew where they were going and he was too jaded to care. A sleepless night of bewilderment and self-disgust at his own surly, unaccountable mood had brought a revelation that stunned and humbled him.
He loved her! In a blinding flash of realization, he saw that from the moment of their first meeting she had possessed him, body and soul. It was that which had stirred his resentment to berserk rage when Starr Wiley had laid insolent hands upon her in the lane; it was for her and her alone that he had run the gantlet of El Negrito's forces and dared the desperate ride.
And she? Immeasurably removed from him now, impenetrably walled in from his presumptuous gaze by the newly-gained inheritance, there was yet a golden key which he might find here in this flower-grown wilderness which would grant him entrance to her world on an equal footing with all men. She could not have learned to care for him in their few hours of companions.h.i.+p, but at least no one else held claim to her. There was still a chance!
It was characteristic of him that, having worked out his problem, he wasted no thought on futile regret or selfish repining at the fortune which had smiled on her. It should smile on him, too, and then, and not till then, he would go to her.
The Pool of the Lost Souls! That was the solution, that the golden key to the future! That others had been before him in the fruitless search of weary generations past was of no moment in the fire of his enthusiasm.
The noontide blaze of heat found him many miles upon an unfamiliar road, and, heedless of lurking enemies in the undergrowth, he flung himself down in the shade of a mighty orchid-laden tree, while the puzzled but equable pinto grazed nearby.
Worn with the emotional conflict through which he had pa.s.sed, and the sleepless night preceding the hard-ridden hours, his day-dream faded into deep slumber and the shadows were slanting across the road when he awoke with a sudden start. No living thing was in sight save the pinto tethered close at hand; the road ran level and white and deserted as far as the eye could see and only the afternoon breeze rustled the dense foliage above and about him, yet Thode could have sworn that he was under observation.
He flung the thought from him with a laugh as he picked himself up, but it persisted in spite of his efforts to exorcise it. Something unexplained but almost tangible rode at his shoulder on the homeward way, and he caught himself more than once straining his ears for a betraying sound behind him. So acute was the sensation of surveillance that he pulled up abruptly around a sharp turn in the road and listened, but no following hoof-beats broke the stillness, and mentally deriding the notion, he cantered on into town.
His mid-day reverie had carried him back over every detail of the legend Ben Hallock had related of the Pool, and one chance remark returned to him with the force of an inspiration. Hallock himself had learned the story from a hunchbacked Mexican who had it from his grandmother, and the little Jose, the crippled victim of Starr Wiley's heedless brutality, had been hunchbacked; the old crone in the shack by the zapote trees, his grandmother, looked as if many mysteries and legends might be hidden behind her fierce, inscrutable eyes.
This was slender foundation on which to build a theory, but how else had the little lad awakened the vengeful antipathy of Wiley? What was it that he refused to tell him?
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