"Let me take you home, Vesta," he said.
She withdrew her hands, discovering tears on her cheeks. Saying nothing, she started to retrace the way of that mad, murderous race. She did not resent his familiar address, if conscious of it at all, for he spoke with the sympathetic tenderness one employs toward a suffering child.
They rode back to the fence without a word between them. When they came to the cut wires he rode through as if he intended to continue on with her to the ranchhouse, six or seven miles away.
"I can go on alone, Mr. Lambert," she said.
"My tools are down here a mile or so. I"ll have to get them to fix this hole."
A little way again in silence. Although he rode slowly she made no effort to separate from his company and go her way alone. She seemed very weary and depressed, her sensitive face reflecting the strain of the past hour. It had borne on her with the wearing intensity of sleepless nights.
"I"m tired of this fighting and contending for evermore!" she said.
Lambert offered no comment. There was little, indeed, that he could frame on his tongue to fit the occasion, it seemed to him, still under the shadow of the dreadful thing that he had averted but a little while before. There was a feeling over him that he had seen this warm, breathing woman, with the best of her life before her, standing on the brink of a terrifying chasm into which one little movement would have precipitated her beyond the help of any friendly hand.
She did not realize what it meant to take the life of another, even with full justification at her hand; she never had felt that weight of ashes above the heart, or the presence of the shadow that tinctured all life with its somber gloom. It was one thing for the law to absolve a slayer; another to find absolution in his own conscience. It was a strain that tried a man"s mind. A woman like Vesta Philbrook might go mad under the unceasing pressure and chafing of that load.
When they came to where his tools and wire lay beside the fence, she stopped. Lambert dismounted in silence, tied a coil of wire to his saddle, strung the chain of the wire-stretcher on his arm.
"Did you know her before you came here?" she asked, with such abruptness, such lack of preparation for the question, that it seemed a fragment of what had been running through her mind.
"You mean----?"
"That woman, Grace Kerr."
"No, I never knew her."
"I thought maybe you"d met her, she"s been away at school somewhere--Omaha, I think. Were you talking to her long?"
"Only a little while."
"What did you think of her?"
"I thought," said he, slowly, his face turned from her, his eyes on something miles away, "that she was a girl something could be made out of if she was taken hold of the right way. I mean," facing her earnestly, "that she might be reasoned out of this senseless barbarity, this raiding and running away."
Vesta shook her head. "The devil"s in her; she was born to make trouble."
"I got her to half agree to a truce," said he reluctantly, his eyes studying the ground, "but I guess it"s all off now."
"She wouldn"t keep her word with you," she declared with great earnestness, a sad, rather than scornful earnestness, putting out her hand as if to touch his shoulder. Half way her intention seemed to falter; her hand fell in eloquent expression of her heavy thoughts.
"Of course, I don"t know."
"There"s no honor in the Kerr blood. Kerr was given many a chance by father to come up and be a man, and square things between them, but he didn"t have it in him. Neither has she. Her only brother was killed at Glendora after he"d shot a man in the back."
"It ought to have been settled, long ago, without all this fighting. But if people refuse to live by their neighbors and be decent, a good man among them has a hard time. I don"t blame you, Vesta, for the way you feel."
"I"d have been willing to let this feud die, but she wouldn"t drop it.
She began cutting the fence every summer as soon as I came home. She"s goaded me out of my senses, she"s put murder in my heart!"
"They"ve tried you almost past endurance, I know. But you"ve never killed anybody, Vesta. All there is here isn"t worth that price."
"I know it now," she said, wearily.
"Go home and hang your gun up, and let it stay there. As long as I"m here I"ll do the fighting when there"s any to be done."
"You didn"t help me a little while ago. All you did was for her."
"It was for both of you," he said, rather indignant that she should take such an unjust view of his interference.
"You didn"t ride in front of her and stop her from shooting me!"
"I came to you first--you saw that."
Lambert mounted, turned his horse to go back and mend the fence. She rode after him, impulsively.
"I"m going to stop fighting, I"m going to take my gun off and put it away," she said.
He thought she never had appeared so handsome as at that moment, a soft light in her eyes, the harshness of strain and anger gone out of her face. He offered her his hand, the only expression of his appreciation for her generous decision that came to him in the gratefulness of the moment. She took it as if to seal a compact between them.
"You"ve come back to be a woman again," he said, hardly realizing how strange his words might seem to her, expressing the one thought that came to the front.
"I suppose I didn"t act much like a woman out there a while ago," she admitted, her old expression of sadness darkening in her eyes.
"You were a couple of wildcats," he told her. "Maybe we can get on here now without fighting, but if they come crowding it on let us men-folks take care of it for you; it"s no job for a girl."
"I"m going to put the thought of it out of my mind, feud, fences, everything--and turn it all over to you. It"s asking a lot of you to a.s.sume, but I"m tired to the heart."
"I"ll do the best by you I can as long as I"m here," he promised, simply. He started on; she rode forward with him.
"If she comes back again, what will you do?"
"I"ll try to show her where she"s wrong, and maybe I can get her to hang up her gun, too. You ought to be friends, it seems to me--a couple of neighbor girls like you."
"We couldn"t be that," she said, loftily, her old coldness coming over her momentarily, "but if we can live apart in peace it will be something. Don"t trust her, Mr. Lambert, don"t take her word for anything. There"s no honor in the Kerr blood; you"ll find that out for yourself. It isn"t in one of them to be even a disinterested friend."
There was nothing for him to say to this, spoken so seriously that it seemed almost a prophecy. He felt as if she had looked into the window of his heart and read his secret and, in her old enmity for this slim girl of the dangling braid of hair, was working subtly to raise a barrier of suspicion and distrust between them.
"I"ll go on home and quit bothering you," she said.
"You"re no bother to me, Vesta; I like to have you along."
She stopped, looked toward the place where she had lately ridden through the fence in vengeful pursuit of her enemy, her eyes inscrutable, her face sad.
"I never felt it so lonesome out here as it is today," she said, and turned her horse, and left him.
He looked back more than once as he rode slowly along the fence, a mist before his perception that he could not pierce. What had come over Vesta to change her so completely in this little while? He believed she was entering the shadow of some slow-growing illness, which bore down her spirits in an uninterpreted foreboding of evil days to come.