Prairie Flowers | Page 3

the sequence, mercilessly:
"And your ride with Purdy, and Old Bat thrusting the gun into my hand
and urging me to follow--and when I looked up and saw you both on
the rim of the bench and saw him drag you from your horse--then the
mad dash up the steep trail, and the quick shot as he raised above the
sage brush--and then, the fake lynching bee--only it was very real to me
as I stood there in the moonlight under that cottonwood limb with a
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