"Thank G.o.d I"ve found you!" he repeated, with a strange quaver to his voice.
"Arnold Bruce! What are you doing here?"
"Didn"t you hear me shout after you, when you started, that I was coming, too?"
"I heard your voice, but not what you said."
"Do you think I would let you go out alone on a night like this?" he demanded in his unstrung tone. "It"s no night for a man to be out, much less a woman!"
"You mean--you followed me?"
"What else did you think I"d do?"
"And on foot?"
"If I had stopped to get a horse I"d have lost your direction. So I ran after you."
They were moving on now, his hand upon the back of her saddle to link them together in the darkness. He had to lean close to her that their voices might be heard above the storm.
"And you have run after me all this way?"
"Ran and walked. But I couldn"t make much headway in the storm--Calling out to you every few steps. I didn"t know what might have happened to you. All kinds of pictures were in my mind. You might have been thrown and be lying hurt. In the darkness the horse might have wandered off the road and slipped with you into the river. It was--it was----" She felt the strong forearm that lay against her back quiver violently. "Oh, why did you do it!" he burst out.
A strange, warm tingling crept through her.
"I--I----" Something seemed to choke her.
"Oh, why did you do it!" he repeated.
Contrary to her determination of but a little while ago, an impulse surged up in her to tell him all she had just learned, to tell him all her plans. She hung for a moment in indecision. Then her old att.i.tude, her old determination, resumed its sway.
"I had a suspicion that I might learn something about father"s case,"
she said.
"It was foolishness!" he cried in fierce reproof, yet with the same unnerved quaver in his voice. "You should have known you could find nothing on such a night as this!"
She felt half an impulse to retort sharply with the truth. But the thought of his stumbling all that way in the blackness subdued her rising impulse to triumph over him. So she made no reply at all.
"You should never have come! If, when you started, you had stopped long enough for me to speak to you, I could have told you you would not have found out anything. You did not, now did you?"
She still kept silent.
"I knew you did not!" he cried in exasperated triumph. "Admit the truth--you know you did not!"
"I did not learn everything I had hoped."
"Don"t be afraid to acknowledge the truth!"
"You remember what I said when you were first offered the nomination by Mr. Peck--to beware of him?"
"Yes. You were wrong. But let"s not talk about that now!"
"I am certain now that I was right. I have the best of reasons for believing that Mr. Peck intends to sell you out."
"What reasons?"
She hesitated a moment.
"I cannot give them to you--now. But I tell you I am certain he is planning treachery."
"Your talk is wild. As wild as your ride out here to-night."
"But I tell you----"
"Let"s talk no more about it now," he interrupted, brushing the matter aside. "It--it doesn"t interest me now."
There was a blinding glare of lightning, then an awful clap of thunder that rattled in wild echoes down the valley.
"Oh, why did you come?" he cried, pressing closer. "Why did you come?
It"s enough to kill a woman!"
"Hardly," said she.
"But you"re wet through," he protested.
"And so are you."
"Have my coat." And he started to slip it off.
"No. One more wet garment won"t make me any drier."
"Then put it over your head. To keep off this awful beat of the storm.
I"ll lead your horse."
"No, thank you; I"m all right," she said firmly, putting out a hand and checking his motion to uncoat himself. "You"ve been walking. I"ve been riding. You need it more than I do." And then she added: "Did I hurt you much?"
"Hurt me?"
"When I struck you with my crop."
"That? I"d forgotten that."
"I"m very sorry--if I hurt you."
"It"s nothing. I wish you"d take my coat. Bend lower down." And moving forward, he so placed himself that his broad, strong body was a partial shield to her against the gale.
This new concern for her, the like of which he had never before evinced the faintest symptoms, begot in her a strange, tingling, but blurred emotion. They moved on side by side, now without speech, gasping for the very breath that the gale sought to tear away from their lips. The storm was momently gaining power and fury. Afterward the ancient weather-men of Calloway County were to say that in their time they had never seen its like. The lightning split the sky into even more fearsome fiery chasms, and in the moments of wild illumination they could see the road gullied by scores of impromptu rivulets, could glimpse the broad river billowing and raging, the cattle huddling terrified in the pastures, the woods swaying and writhing in deathlike grapple. The wind hurled by them in a thousand moods and tones, all angry; a fine, high shrieking on its topmost note--a hoa.r.s.e snarl--a lull, as though the straining monster were pausing to catch its breath--then a roaring, sweeping onrush as if bent on irresistible destruction. And on top of this glare, this rage, was the thousandfold crackle, rattle, rumble of the thunder.