"You aren"t going to tell me, are you," she asked, "that anything dreadful has happened to Garry?"
Dumbly, but most rea.s.suringly, Steve shook his head. From the top of her hatless, wind-tossed, brown-crowned head to the tips of the absurdly small boots tucked up beneath her, he scanned her slim body.
Barbara realized that he was trying to speak and finding the effort hard. Slowly he removed his hat and pa.s.sed one hand across his forehead.
"Man," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed fervidly to himself, "but that"s the longest hundred yards you"ve ever traveled, on foot or a-horseback!" And abruptly, accusingly, to her: "Do you know that I"ve been months and years and ages rounding that bend to--to find you a little crumpled-up heap in the road?"
After all, her unaccountably high spirits may have been only the natural reaction from the hours of depression through which she had lately pa.s.sed. But whatever the reason behind it, Barbara"s levity was a totally spontaneous, deliciously colored thing. She sat and tilted her head at him in audacious provocation; she a.s.sumed as chastened an expression as she could in the face of her very real relief at the news of Garry"s safety.
"I"m sorry," she murmured humbly. "I"m sorry to--disappoint you. But, you see, I didn"t know----"
She laughed at him. Her lips curled, petal-like, in a gurgling peal of enjoyment at his shame-faced grin.
"I found your horse rolling," he explained, and his gravity was dogged in the face of her brightness. "How I knew it was yours I don"t know, but I did just the same. I thought she had thrown you; I"d already made up my mind, if there was one scratch on your body, to take that mare"s head between my hands and break her neck! You see, I believed I knew already just what it would mean to me if anything ever happened to you. But it"s a lot different imagining the world without you--and--and facing the actual possibility of it. Was I--fairly tragic?"
And now it was his turn to laugh over her pink-faced disconcernment.
Most decidedly it was not the sort of an encounter which she had been contemplating a moment earlier. There was no discomfort in that big, loose-limbed body. She had imagined him as just a little moody and sad-eyed, at least. And now she realized that she had never seen the latter so easy to read as they were at that minute. Gray as the shadowed silver thread of the river far below in the valley, they glowed with a great gladness for her safety, and far, far more than just that. The alarming cheerfulness of his gaze was too confusing to sustain.
"Of course you"ve found Garry," she hastened to swing the conversation to a less personal quarter. "Is he--will you tell me about it, please?"
One small, gauntleted hand made an almost imperceptible gesture toward the unoccupied s.p.a.ce beside her on the fallen tree. But he chose the ground at her feet. And after he had disposed his long length to his liking he answered her hurried question--answered it with an amiably lazy deliberation that promised a sure return to a topic of his own choosing, in his own good time.
"No," he stated, and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of the statement. "He found me. And it was the biggest stroke of luck that he did. I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn"t you say so?"
The question was quite innocently direct. No, decidedly he was not discomfited--not ill at ease at all! Apparently he found it much easier to look at her than at any of the points of interest in the landscape toward which her glances persisted in flitting. While he marveled, without any manifestations of sorrow whatever, at the curve of her throat and the satin texture of that cheek turned toward him, he told her drawlingly all there was to tell of the night before. And after a time Barbara forgot her warm face and the too plain message there in his eyes, in her growing excitement over that recitation.
When he stopped her first question instinctively pounced upon the one detail he had purposely withheld.
"But you must have an inkling as to the man"s ident.i.ty," she cried.
"Why, you"ve got to find that out, before he does more harm next time.
Haven"t you a suspicion, even?"
One foot swung free; she leaned forward in her eagerness, a slender and entirely boyish figure in diminutive breeches and boots and straight-lined coat. And the man laughed aloud up into her flushed face, softly and not quite steadily at her hostile indignation, her intuitive feminine curiosity, and most of all, most unsteadily, at his wonder of her, herself.
"Why, yes," he admitted. "Both Joe and I do believe we know who it was, but we aren"t sure because we don"t understand yet what that man"s motive might be. I"d tell you, only I don"t like to accuse anybody until there is cause for it. But that"s what brought me down here this morning--that and because I wanted to tell Miss Burrell that Garry is safe, and will continue to be from now on, I hope. Those were two of my reasons for coming, at least. I had a more important one than either, but----"
Barbara did not wait for him to tell her what it was. She was staring at him in unfeigned surprise.
"To tell Miriam?" she echoed. "Do you--you can"t mean that you knew she cared for Garry?"
"Didn"t you?"
The girl shook her head.
"Never, until just a little while ago! I--do you know, in the last few days I"ve begun to realize how much more you--other people--observe than I do. I"ve begun to wonder if I haven"t been very blindly self-sufficient. For I never dreamed of such a thing, until something happened after I left you last night." Her voice faltered, but her eyes clung resolutely to his. "She came to me and asked me if I knew where he had gone. She had seen him ride away, too, Mr. O"Mara. And I learned it then, just from the terror in her face. But I didn"t know until later how much she cared.
"She came into my room this morning, and that, although you can"t know it, was more than odd in itself, because I have always been the one to carry my woes to her. It must have been between four and five, for I had counted a clock striking four; and yet she was still dressed in her party costume. Have you guessed what she had been doing? Mr. O"Mara, she had been out looking for him! She had slipped out and been waiting because she was sure Ragtime would bolt and--and come back home, dragging him by a stirrup! Wasn"t that a horrible thing to wait for, alone in the dark?"
With a little shudder the girl put her hands over her eyes, as if to shut out the picture.
"She wasn"t hysterical, either. She was--just--ice! And wringing wet and blue with cold. Cool, proud, intolerant Miriam Burrell--and I"d never dreamed of her caring for anybody, until that minute. I sent her to bed and I think I hated Garry Devereau for an hour or two. Why, Mr.
O"Mara, I"d never believed that a girl could care that much for any man!"
He stopped toying with a handful of dry twigs and let them slip away between his fingers. She saw his head come up; saw his eyes narrow.
Then her own body stiffened as she realized what she had said. And yet it was, after all, only a part of something she had decided she must make clear to him, ever since he had surprised her there at the road edge; it was part of an explanation which, without quite knowing why, she felt was due to him. But she had not meant to employ that abrupt confession as a preface. That made it inconceivably harder, it seemed.
And he, silent at her feet, stared out at the blue rim of the hills and gave her no a.s.sistance now--not so much as a smile. She sat a long time, nursing one slim knee between her palms.
"Mr. O"Mara," she appealed to him at last, "how might one reopen a--a rather difficult subject with--with a suddenly most difficult conversationalist?"
Without turning his head he made answer:
"I think Fat Joe"s method is as good as any," he suggested. "Joe says the only way to reopen any argument is to take a running jump and land all spraddled out, right in the middle of it. He insists that such procedure leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone that the discussion is about to be resumed."
She laughed a little.
"Then shall we consider that I"ve taken--the--the jump, and landed?"
Just when she was wishing most that she could see his face he swung around toward her. Again his gravity was a totally gentle thing. It made her remember the self-possessed kindliness with which he had met her unreasoning rage the night before.
"You don"t have to explain," he told her, "unless you are sure you want to. Sometimes, you see, I understand things without any special explanation. It"s a trick one learns from living alone a lot with one"s own thoughts. I told you, last night, that I wouldn"t have you saying "I"m sorry" to me. And now I"ll tell you that nothing you can ever say, now, is going to stop me from----"
"I want to, please," she interrupted him vehemently. "I--have to! And I"m not going to make believe that I don"t know what you are going to tell me--what you have been saying to me, all morning. But it can"t do any good. Why, I"m just realizing that something which has been hurting me for hours was just--just sorrow for you. It can"t do any good, oh, truly! But will you let me talk first, if I promise to listen afterward?"
He promised.
"Twice I"ve been bitterly unkind to you," she began again. "Once a long time ago--and--and once last night. And on both occasions you had just tried to tell me, indirectly at least, that you cared, hadn"t you?"
"Indirectly?" he murmured. "Was I as obscure as that?" And then, whimsically: "Won"t you call that explanation enough, and let me tell it to you again--so you can"t misunderstand?"
"I"ve asked you to forgive me the first offense," she hurriedly denied his appeal. "And the second--Mr. O"Mara, last night Miriam said something to me, something that she wouldn"t have said if she hadn"t been half mad with fear. It was unkind, unfair, but it made me wonder if, perhaps, you might not be thinking the same thing, too. Years ago you told me I didn"t think you good enough to--to be my knight. My outburst was only childish temper that day, but did you think last night that I still underrated you?"
Steve finally shook his head when she persisted in waiting for his answer.
"You just have to finish now," he warned her, however. "It was your own bargain. I"m not going to tell you one single bit of what I think of you until it comes my turn!"
She tried to laugh at his stubbornness, but she had trouble with this explanation, which grew more vexingly intricate and involved the further she went.
"Then we"ll say you didn"t," she continued. "I told you last night, less kindly than I might have, that I was engaged to Mr. Wickersham.
And I"ve just confessed, too, that I didn"t know a girl could care for any man as unutterably, as blindly and pridelessly, as Miriam cares for the man Garry is. That is the truth. For quite a long, long time it has been understood that I was to marry Mr. Wickersham. I have always admired him--found him above petty things. But, Mr. O"Mara, I have always been sure, for just as long a time, that the ability to care for anyone the--the way I think you believed last night I might care for you, was left out of me. And so it wasn"t you who awoke my contempt, even though I did turn it against you. It was I, myself. It was I, and not you, who was not "good enough"! For even if I am the kind of a girl who can"t love anybody, very much, except, perhaps, herself, I should at least play fair. Isn"t--isn"t that so?"
Minute after minute pa.s.sed while she sat plaiting the cloth tight-stretched over one knee. Lips softly aquiver, she waited, earnest, eager that he understand from her explanation that which she did not yet understand at all herself. Again she wished that he would turn; she wanted greatly to see whatever there might be behind his heavy silence.
"Isn"t it?" she faltered timidly.
And yet, when his head did come around she found she couldn"t face him.
"Is it my turn now?" he asked.
Her answer was barely audible.