"Well--I"ll--be--" Grant began, in blank amazement.
She wriggled her chin in his palm, trying to free herself from his pitiless staring. Failing that, she began to sob angrily without any tears in her wide eyes.
"You--shot me, you brute!" she cried accusingly at last. "You--SHOT me!"
And she sobbed again.
Before he answered, he drew backward a step or two, sat down upon the edge of a rock which had rolled out from a stone-heap, and pulled her down beside him, still holding her fast, as if he half believed her capable of soaring away over the treetops, after all.
"I guess I didn"t murder you--from the chase you gave me. Did I hit you at all?"
"Yes, you did! You nearly broke my arm--and you might have killed me, you big brute! Look what you did--and I never harmed you at all!" She pushed up a sleeve, and held out her arm accusingly in the moonlight, disclosing a tiny, red furrow where the skin was broken and still bleeding. "And you shot a big hole right through Aunt Phoebe"s sheet!"
she added, with tearful severity.
He caught her arm, bent his head over it--and for a moment he was perilously near to kissing it; an impulse which astonished him considerably, and angered him more. He dropped the arm rather precipitately; and she lifted it again, and regarded the wound with mournful interest.
"I"d like to know what right you have to prowl around shooting at people," she scolded, seeing how close she could come to touching the place with her fingertips without producing any but a pleasurable pain.
"Just as much right as you have to get up in the middle of the night and go ahowling all over the ranch wrapped up in a sheet," he retorted ungallantly.
"Well, if I want to do it, I don"t see why you need concern yourself about it. I wasn"t doing it for your benefit, anyway."
"Will you tell me what you DID do it for? Of all the silly tomfoolery--"
An impish smile quite obliterated the Christmas-angel look for an instant, then vanished, and left her a pretty, abused maiden who is grieved at harsh treatment.
"Well, I wanted to scare Gene," she confessed. "I did, too. I just know he"s a cowardy-cat, because he"s always trying to scare ME. It"s Gene"s fault--he told me the grove is haunted. He said a long time ago, before Uncle Hart settled here, a lot of Indians waylaid a wagon-train here and killed a girl, and he says that when the moon is just past the full, something white walks through the grove and wails like a lost soul in torment. He says sometimes it comes and moans at the corner of the house where my room is. I just know he was going to do it himself; but I guess he forgot. So I thought I"d see if he believed his own yarns. I was going to do it every night till I scared him into sleeping in the house.
I had a perfectly lovely place to disappear into, where he couldn"t trace me if he took to hunting around--only he wouldn"t dare." She pulled down her sleeve very carefully, and then, just as carefully, she pushed it up again, and took another look.
"My best friend TOLD me I"d get shot if I came to Idaho," she reminded herself, with a melancholy satisfaction.
"You didn"t get shot," Grant contradicted for the sake of drawing more sparks of temper where temper seemed quaintly out of place, and stared hard at her drooping profile. "You just got nicely missed; a bullet that only sc.r.a.pes off a little skin can"t be said to hit. I"d hate to hit a bear like that."
"I believe you"re wishing you HAD killed me! You might at least have some conscience in the matter, and be sorry you shot a lady. But you"re not. You just wish you had murdered me. You hate girls--you said so. And I don"t know what business it is of yours, if I want to play a joke on my cousin, or why you had to be sleeping outside, anyway. I"ve a perfect right to be a ghost if I choose--and I don"t call it nice, or polite, or gentlemanly for you to chase me all over the place with a gun, trying to kill me! I"ll never speak to you again as long as I live. When I say that I mean it. I never liked you from the very start, when I first saw you this afternoon. Now I hate and despise you. I suppose I oughtn"t to expect you to apologize or be sorry because you almost killed me. I suppose that"s just your real nature coming to the surface. Indians love to hurt and torture people! I shouldn"t have expected anything else of you, I suppose. I made the mistake of treating you like a white man."
"Don"t you think you"re making another mistake right now?" Grant"s whole att.i.tude changed, as well as his tone. "Aren"t you afraid to push the white man down into the dirt, and raise up--the INDIAN?"
She cast a swift, half-frightened glance up into his face and the eyes that glowed ominously in the moonlight.
"When people make the blunder of calling up the Indian," he went on steadily, "they usually find that they have to deal with--the Indian."
Evadna looked at him again, and turned slowly white before her temper surged to the surface again.
"I didn"t call up the Indian," she defended hotly; "but if the Indian wants to deal with me according to his nature--why, let him! But you don"t ACT like other people! I don"t know another man who wouldn"t have been horrified at shooting me, even such a tiny little bit; but you don"t care at all. You never even said you were sorry."
"I"m not in the habit of saying all I think and feel."
"You were quick enough to apologize, after supper there, when you hadn"t really done anything; and now, when one would expect you to be at least decently sorry, you--you--well, you act like the savage you are! There, now! It may not be nice to say it, but it"s the truth."
Grant smiled bitterly. "All men are savages under the skin," he said.
"How do YOU know what I think and feel? If I fail to come through with the conventional patter, I am called an Indian--because my mother was a half-breed." He threw up his head proudly, let his eyes rest for a moment upon the moon, swimming through a white river of clouds just over the tall poplar hedge planted long ago to shelter the orchard from the sweeping west winds; and, when he looked down at her again, he caught a glimpse of repentant tears in her eyes, and softened.
"Oh, you"re a girl, and you demand the usual amount of poor-p.u.s.s.y talk,"
he told her maliciously. "So I"m sorry. I"m heartbroken. If it will help any, I"ll even kiss the hurt to make it well--and I"m not a kissing young man, either, let me tell you."
"I"d die before I"d let you touch me!" Her repentance, if it was that, changed to pure rage. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the torn sheet from him and turned abruptly toward the fence. He followed her, apparently unmoved by her att.i.tude; placed his foot upon the lower wire and pressed it into the soft earth, lifted the one next above it as high as it would go, and thus made it easier for her to pa.s.s through. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though tempted to reject even that slight favor, then stooped, and went through.
As the wires snapped into place, she halted and looked back at him.
"Maybe I"ve been mean--but you"re been meaner," she summed up, in self-justification. "I suppose the next thing you will do will be to tell the boys. Well, I don"t care what you do, so long as you never speak to me again. Go and tell them if you want to--tell. TELL, do you hear? I don"t want even the favor of your silence!" She dexterously tucked the bundle of white under the uninjured arm, caught the loose folds of her skirt up in her hands, and ran away up the path, not once stopping to see whether he still followed her.
Grant did not follow. He stood leaning against the fence-post, and watched her until her flying form grew indistinct in the shade of the poplar hedge; watched it reappear in a broad strip of white moonlight, still running; saw it turn, slacken speed to a walk, and then lose itself in the darkness of the grove.
Five minutes, ten minutes, he stood there, staring across the level bit of valley lying quiet at the foot of the jagged-rimmed bluff standing boldly up against the star-flecked sky. Then he shook himself impatiently, muttered something which had to do with a "doddering fool,"
and retraced his steps quickly through the orchard, the currant bushes, and the strawberry patch, jumped the ditch, and so entered the grove and returned to his blankets.
"We thought the spook had got yuh, sure." Gene lifted his head turtlewise and laughed deprecatingly. "We was just about ready to start out after the corpse, only we didn"t know but what you might get excited and take a shot at us in the dark. We heard yuh shoot--what was it? Did you find out?"
"It wasn"t anything," said Grant shortly, tugging at a boot.
"Ah--there was, too! What was it you shot at?" Clark joined in the argument from the blackness under the locust tree.
"The moon," Grant told him sullenly. "There wasn"t anything else that I could see."
"And that"s a lie," Gene amended, with the frankness of a foster-brother. "Something yelled like--"
"You never heard a screech-owl before, did you, Gene?" Grant crept between his blankets and snuggled down, as if his mind held nothing more important than sleep.
"Screech-owl my granny! You b.u.mped into something you couldn"t handle--if you want to know what _I_ think about it," Clark guessed shrewdly. "I wish now I"d taken the trouble to hunt the thing down; it didn"t seem worth while getting up. But I leave it to Gene if you ain"t mad enough to murder whatever it was. What was it?"
He waited a moment without getting a reply.
"Well, keep your teeth shut down on it, then, darn yuh!" he growled.
"That"s the Injun of it--I know YOU! Screech-owl--huh! You said when you left it was an Indian--and that"s why we didn"t take after it ourselves.
We don"t want to get the whole bunch down on us like they are on you--and if there was one acting up around here, we knew blamed well it was on your account for what happened to-day. I guess you found out, all right. I knew the minute you heaved in sight that you was just about as mad as you can get--and that"s saying a whole lot. If it WAS an Indian, and you killed him, you better let us--"
"Oh, for the lord"s sake, WILL YOU SHUT UP!" Grant raised to an elbow, glared a moment, and lay down again.
The result proved the sort of fellow he was. Clark shut up without even trailing off into mumbling to himself, as was his habit when argument brought him defeat.
CHAPTER VII. MISS GEORGIE HOWARD, OPERATOR
"Where is the delightful Mr. Good Indian off to?" Evadna stopped drumming upon the gatepost and turned toward the person she heard coming up behind her, who happened to be Gene. He stopped to light a match upon the gate and put his cigarette to work before he answered her; and Evadna touched tentatively the wide, blue ribbon wound round her arm and tied in a bow at her elbow, and eyed him guardedly.
"Straight up, he told me," Gene answered sourly. "He"s sore over something that happened last night, and he didn"t seem to have any talk to give away this morning. He can go to the d.i.c.kens, for all I care."
"WHAT--happened last night?" Evadna wore her Christmas-angel expression; and her tone was the sweet, insipid tone of childlike innocence.