Rowdy of the Cross L | Page 4

eyes. It's your own fault."
Dixie, sneezing the snow from his nostrils, turned obediently; Chub, his feet dragging wearily in the snow, trailed patiently behind. Half an hour of this, and it seemed as if it would go on forever.
Through the swirl Vaughan could see the posts standing forlornly in the snow, with sixteen feet of blizzard between; at no time could he distinguish more than two or three at once, and there were long minutes when the wall stood, blank and shifting, just beyond the first post.
Then Dixie lifted his head and gazed questioningly before him, his ears pointed forward--sentient, strained--and whinnied shrill challenge. He hurried his steps, dragging Chub out of the beginnings of a dream. Vaughan straightened and took his hands from his pockets.
Out beyond the dim, wavering outline of the farthest post came answer to the challenge. A mysterious, vague shape grew impalpably upon the strained vision; a horse sneezed, then nickered eagerly. Vaughan drew up and waited.
"Hello!" he called cheerfully. "Pleasant day, this. Out for your health?"
The shape hesitated, as though taken aback by the greeting, and there was no answer. Vaughan, puzzled, rode closer.
"Say, don't talk so fast!" he yelled. "I can't follow yuh."
"Who--who is it?" The voice sounded perturbed; and it was, moreover, the voice of a woman.
Vaughan pulled up short and swore into his collar. Women are not, as a rule, to be met out on the blank prairie in a blizzard. His voice, when he spoke again, was not ironical, as it had been; it was placating.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I thought it was a man. I'm looking for the Cross L; you don't happen to know where it is, do yuh?"
"No--I don't," she declared dismally. "I don't know where any place is. I'm teaching school in this neighborhood--or in some other. I was going to spend Sunday with a friend, but this storm came up, and I'm--lost."
"Same here," said Rowdy pleasantly, as though being lost was a matter for congratulation.
"Oh! I was in hopes--"
"So was I, so we're even there. We'll have to pool our chances, I guess. Any gate down that way--or haven't you followed the fence?"
"I followed it for miles and miles--it seemed. It must be some big field of the Cross L; but they have so very many big fields!"
"And you couldn't give a rough guess at how far it is to the Cross L?"--insinuatingly.
He could vaguely see her shake of head. "Ordinarily it should be about six miles beyond Rodway's, where I board. But I haven't the haziest idea of where Rodway's place is, you see; so that won't help you much. I'm all at sea in this snow." Her voice was rueful.
"Well, if you came up the fence, there's no use going back that way; and there's sure nothing made by going away from it.--that's the way I came. Why not go on the way you're headed?"
"We might as well, I suppose," she assented; and Rowdy turned and rode by her side, grateful for the plurality of the pronoun which tacitly included him in her wanderings, and meditating many things. For one, he wondered if she were as nice a girl as her voice sounded. He could not see much of her face, because it was muffled in a white silk scarf. Only her eyes showed, and they were dark and bright.
When he awoke to the fact that the wind, grown colder, beat upon her cruelly, he dropped behind a pace and took the windy side, that he might shield her with his body. But if she observed the action she gave no sign; her face was turned from him and the wind, and she rode without speaking. After long plodding, the line of posts turned unexpectedly a right angle, and Vaughan took a long, relieved breath.
"We'll have the wind on our backs now," he remarked. "I guess we may as well keep on and see where this fence goes to."
His tone was too elaborately cheerful to be very cheering.He was wondering if the girl was dressed warmly. It had been so warm and sunny before the blizzard struck, but now the wind searched out the thin places in one's clothing and ran lead in one's bones, where should be simply marrow. He fancied that her voice, when she spoke, gave evidence of actual suffering--and the heart of Rowdy Vaughan was ever soft toward a woman.
"If you're cold," he began, "I'll open up my bed and get out a blanket." He held Dixie in tentatively.
"Oh, don't trouble to do that," she protested; but there was that in her voice which hardened his impulse into fixed resolution.
"I ought to have thought of it before," he lamented, and swung down stiffly into the snow.
Her eyes followed his movement with a very evident interest while he unbuckled