The Quirt | Page 8

Suddenly it
was whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from the

road. To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather, it
seemed to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.
After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch,
she came to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of
which the creek itself was flowing swiftly. Here the road forked, a
rough, little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better traveled road
crossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitated
before she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.
From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorraine
wondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrow
skirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and watered
her eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which she
had seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lower
and lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little, twittery
birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily for
horsemen.
Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,
unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the
west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes
the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the
earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a
thunderstorm she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a
deadly, terrifying peril she never had quite believed. Her mother had
told of people being struck by lightning, but Lorraine could not
associate lightning with death, especially in the West, where men
usually died by shooting, lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.
The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the
twinkling lights far behind her--lights which must be the small part at
last visible of Echo, Idaho--Lorraine went on. She had been walking
steadily for four hours, and she must surely have come nearly twenty
miles. If she ever reached the top of the hill, she believed that she
would see her father's ranch just beyond.
The afterglow had deepened to dusk when she came at last to the

highest point of that long grade. Far ahead loomed a cluster of square,
black objects which must be the ranch buildings of the Quirt, and
Lorraine's spirits lightened a little. What a surprise her father and all his
cowboys would have when she walked in upon them! It was almost
worth the walk, she told herself hearteningly. She hoped that dad had a
good cook. He would wear a flour-sack apron, naturally, and would be
tall and lean, or else very fat. He would be a comedy character, but she
hoped he would not be the grouchy kind, which, though very funny
when he rampages around on the screen, might be rather uncomfortable
to meet when one is tired and hungry and out of sorts. But of course the
crankiest of comedy cooks would be decently civil to her. Men always
were, except directors who are paid for their incivility.
A hollow into which she walked in complete darkness and in silence,
save the gurgling of another stream, hid from sight the shadowy
semblance of houses and barns and sheds. Their disappearance slumped
her spirits again, for without them she was no more than a solitary
speck in the vast loneliness. Their actual nearness could not comfort
her. She was seized with a reasonless, panicky fear that by the time she
crossed the stream and climbed the hill beyond they would no longer be
there where she had seen them. She was lifting her skirts to wade the
creek when the click of hoofs striking against rocks sent her scurrying
to cover in a senseless fear.
"I learned this act from the jack rabbits," she rallied herself shakily,
when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungency made
her horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would be too
ridiculous.
"Some of dad's cowboys, probably, but still they may be bandits."
If they were bandits they could scarcely be out banditting, for the two
horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode
leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse
nearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically for
a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk squatty
and ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and did not
like. It was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet instead of

following her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carry her
grip to the house.
The horses stopped with their forefeet in the water and drooped heads
to drink