The Hunted Woman | Page 7

eyes met once more. With another bow he had turned, and was continuing his way. At the door Joanne Gray looked back. He was whistling again. His careless, easy stride was filled with a freedom that seemed to come to her in the breath of the mountains. And then she, too, smiled strangely as she re?ntered the tent.
CHAPTER III
If John Aldous had betrayed no visible sign of inward vanquishment he at least was feeling its effect. For years his writings had made him the target for a world of women, and many men. The men he had regarded with indifferent toleration. The women were his life--the "frail and ineffective creatures" who gave spice to his great adventure, and made his days anything but monotonous. He was not unchivalrous. Deep down in his heart--and this was his own secret--he did not even despise women. But he had seen their weaknesses and their frailties as perhaps no other man had ever seen them, and he had written of them as no other man had ever written. This had brought him the condemnation of the host, the admiration of the few. His own personal veneer of antagonism against woman was purely artificial, and yet only a few had guessed it. He had built it up about him as a sort of protection. He called himself "an adventurer in the mysteries of feminism," and to be this successfully he had argued that he must destroy in himself the usual heart-emotions of the sex-man and the animal.
How far he had succeeded in this he himself did not know--until these last moments when he had bid good-bye to Joanne Gray. He confessed that she had found a cleft in his armour, and there was an uneasy thrill in his blood. It was not her beauty alone that had affected him. He had trained himself to look at a beautiful woman as he might have looked at a beautiful flower, confident that if he went beyond the mere admiration of it he would find only burned-out ashes. But in her he had seen something that was more than beauty, something that for a flashing moment had set stirring every molecule in his being. He had felt the desire to rest his hand upon her shining hair!
He turned off into a winding path that led into the thick poplars, restraining an inclination to look back in the direction of the Otto camp. He pulled out the pipe he had dropped into his shirt pocket, filled it with fresh tobacco, and began smoking. As he smoked, his lips wore a quizzical smile, for he was honest enough to give Joanne Gray credit for her triumph. She had awakened a new kind of interest in him--only a passing interest, to be sure--but a new kind for all that. The fact amused him. In a large way he was a humourist--few guessing it, and he fully appreciated the humour of the present situation--that he, John Aldous, touted the world over as a woman-hater, wanted to peer out through the poplar foliage and see that wonderful gold-brown head shining in the sun once more!
He wandered more slowly on his way, wondering with fresh interest what his friends, the women, would say when they read his new book. His title for it was "Mothers." It was to be a tremendous surprise.
Suddenly his face became serious. He faced the sound of a distant phonograph. It was not the phonograph in Quade's place, but that of a rival dealer in soft drinks at the end of the "street." For a moment Aldous hesitated. Then he turned in the direction of the camp.
Quade was bolstered up on a stool, his back against the thin partition, when John Aldous sauntered in. There was still a groggy look in his mottled face. His thick bulk hung a bit limply. In his heavy-lidded eyes, under-hung by watery pouches of sin and dissipation, there was a vengeful and beastlike glare. He was surrounded by his friends. One of them was taking a wet cloth from his head. There were a dozen in the canvas-walled room, all with their backs to the door, their eyes upon their fallen and dishonoured chief. For a moment John Aldous paused in the door. The cool and insolent smile hovered about his lips again, and little crinkles had gathered at the corners of his eyes.
"Did I hit you pretty hard, Bill?" he asked.
Every head was turned toward him. Bill Quade stared, his mouth open. He staggered to his feet, and stood dizzily.
"You--damn you!" he cried huskily.
Three or four of the men had already begun to move toward the stranger. Their hands were knotted, their faces murderously dark.
"Wait a minute, boys," warned Aldous coolly. "I've got something to say to you--and Bill. Then eat me alive