Deserted | Page 6

been so jolly, and now she had spoiled it. He could have boxed her pretty little ears.
She wondered why he did not try to light a fire, but she wouldn't ask him another thing, if she died. In point of fact, he knew the sagebrush would not burn. Suddenly the wind blew fiercer, there came a rushing sound, and the top and walls of the wigwam were whisked off like a flash, and as they staggered to their feet, buffeted by the whirling bushes, a cloud of fine alkali-dust enveloped them, blinding their eyes, penetrating their ears and noses, and setting them gasping, sneezing, and coughing spasmodically. Then, like a puff of smoke, the suffocating storm was dissipated, and when they opened their smarting eyes there was nothing but the silent, glorious desolation of the ghostly desert around them, with the snow-peaks in the distance glittering beneath the moon. A sand-spout had struck them, that was all,--one of the whirling dust-columns which they had admired all day from the car-windows.
Wretched enough before, both for physical and sentimental reasons, this last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must be done. Whether anything could be done or not, something must be done.
"Don't leave me," she cried hysterically, as he rushed off to reconnoitre the vicinity.
"I 'll return presently," he called back.
But five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and he did not come back. Terror dried her tears, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had quite given him up for lost, and herself too, when with inexpressible relief she heard him call to her. She replied, and in a moment more he was at her side, breathless with running.
"I lost my bearings," he said. "If you had not answered me, I could not have found you."
"Don't leave me again," she sobbed, clinging to his arm.
He put his arms round her and kissed her. It was mean, base, contemptible, to take advantage of her agitation in that way, but she did not resist, and he did it again and again,--I forbear to say how many times.
"Is n't it a perfectly beautiful night?" he exclaimed, with a fine gush of enthusiasm.
"Is n't it exquisite?" she echoed, with a rush of sympathetic feeling.
"See those stars: they look as if they had just been polished," he cried.
"What a droll idea!" she exclaimed gleefully. "But do see that lovely mountain."
Holding her with a firmer clasp, and speaking with what might be styled a fierce tenderness, he demanded, "What did you mean, miss, by refusing me this afternoon?"
"What did you go at me so stupidly for? I had to refuse," she retorted smilingly.
"Will you be my wife?"
"Yes, sir; I meant to be all the time."
The contract having been properly sealed, Lombard said, with a countenance curiously divided between a tragical expression and a smile of fatuous complacency, "There was a clear case of poetical justice in your being left behind in the desert to-night. To see the lights of the train disappearing, leaving you alone in the midst of desolation, gave you a touch of my feeling on being rejected this afternoon. Of all leavings behind, there's none so miserable as the experience of the rejected lover."
"Poor fellow! so he should n't be left behind. He shall be conductor of the train," she said, with a bewitching laugh. His response was not verbal.
"How cold the wind is!" she said.
"Shall I build you another wigwam?"
"No; let us exercise a little. You whistle 'The Beautiful Blue Danube,' and we'll waltz. This desert is the biggest, jolliest ball-room floor that ever was, and I dare say we shall be the first to waltz on it since the creation of the world. That will be something to boast of when we get home. Come, let's dedicate the Great American Desert to Terpsichore."
They stepped out from among the ruins of their sagebrush booth upon a patch of hard, bare earth close to the railroad track. Lombard puckered his lips and struck up the air, and off they went with as much enthusiasm as if inspired by a first-class orchestra. Round and round, to and fro, they swept until, laughing, flushed, and panting, they came to a stop.
It was then that they first perceived that they were not without a circle of appreciative spectators. Sitting like statues on their sniffing, pawing ponies, a dozen Piute Indians encircled them. Engrossed with the dance and with each other, they had not noticed them as they rode up, attracted from their route by this marvelous spectacle of a pale-face squaw and brave engaged in a solitary