Prairie Flowers | Page 3

noose about my neck. And then the long ride through the night, and the meeting with you at the ford where you were waiting with Old Bat----"
"And the terrible thunder storm, and the bursting reservoir, and the dust storm in the bad lands," continued the girl. "Oh, it was all so--so horrible, and yet--as long as I live I will be glad to have lived those few short days. I learned to know men--big, strong men in action--what they will do--and what they will not do. The Texan with his devil-may-care ways that masked the real character of him. And you, darling--the real you--who had always remained hidden beneath the veneer of your culture and refinement. Then suddenly the veneer was knocked off and for the first time in your life the fine fibre of you--the real stuff you are made of, got the chance to assert itself. You stood the test, dear--stood it as not one man in a hundred who had lived your prosaic well-ordered life would have stood it----"
"Nonsense!" laughed the man. "You're grossly prejudiced. You were in love with me anyway--you know you were. You would have married me in time."
"I was not! I wasn't a bit in love with you--and I wouldn't have married you ever, if it hadn't been for the test." She paused suddenly, and her eyes became serious, "But Win, Tex stood the test too--and he really did love me. Do you know that my heart just aches for that boy, out there all alone in the country he loves--for he is of different stuff than the rest of them. He likes the men--he is one of them--but he would never choose a wife from among their women, and his big heart is just yearning for a woman's love. I shall never forget the last time I saw him--in that little open glade in the timber. He had lost, and he knew it--and he stood there with his arm thrown over the neck of his horse, staring out over the broad bench toward the mountains that showed hazy-blue in the distance. He was game to the last fibre of him. He tried to conceal his hurt, but he could not conceal it. He spoke highly of you--said you were a man--and that I had made no mistake in my choice--and then he spoke the words that filled my cup of happiness to the brim--he told me that you had not killed Purdy--that there was no blood on your hands--and that you were not a fugitive from the law.
"Win, dear--we must find him--we've got to find him!"
"We'll find him--little girl," answered her husband as his arm stole about her shoulders; "I'm just as anxious to find him as you are--and in ten days we will start!"
CHAPTER I
AN ANNIVERSARY
The Texan drew up in the centre of a tiny glade that formed an opening in the bull pine woods. Haze purpled the distant mountains of cow-land, and the cowpuncher's gaze strayed slowly from the serried peaks of the Bear Paws to rest upon the broad expanse of the barren, mica-studded bad lands with their dazzling white alkali beds, and their brilliant red and black mosaic of lava rock that trembled and danced and shimmered in the crinkly waves of heat. For a long time he stared at the Missouri whose yellow-brown waters rolled wide and deep from recent rains. From the silver and gold of the flashing waters his eyes strayed to the smoke-grey sage flats that intervened, and then to the cool dark green of the pines.
Very deliberately he slipped from the saddle, letting the reins fall to the ground. He took off his Stetson and removed its thin powdering of white alkali dust by slapping it noisily against his leather chaps. A light breeze fanned his face and involuntarily his eyes sought the base of a huge rock fragment that jutted boldly into the glade, and as he looked, he was conscious that the air was heavy with the scent of the little blue and white prairie flowers that carpeted the ground at his feet. His thin lips twisted into a cynical smile--a smile that added an unpleasant touch to the clean-cut weather-tanned features. In the space of a second he seemed to have aged ten years--not physically, but--he had aged.
He spoke half aloud, with his grey eyes upon the rock: "It--hurts--like hell. I knew it would hurt, an' I came--rode sixty miles to get to this spot at this hour of this day. It was here she said 'good-bye,' an' then she walked slowly around the rock with her flowers held tight, an' the wind ripplin' that lock of hair, just above her right temple, it was--an' then--she was gone." The man's eyes dropped to the ground. A brilliantly striped beetle climbed