Among the telegrams Bonbright handed him, was one from Graham, which Dick read twice, although it was simple and unmomentous, being merely a postponement of his return.
Contrary to custom, Dick did not wait for the second lunch-gong. At the sound of the first he started, for he felt the desire for one of Oh Joy's cocktails—the need of a prod of courage, after the lilacs, to meet Paula. But she was ahead of him. He found her—who rarely drank, and never alone—just placing an empty cocktail glass back on the tray.
So she, too, had needed courage for the meal, was his deduction, as he nodded to Oh Joy and held up one finger.
«Caught you at it!» he reproved gaily. «Secret tippling. The gravest of symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the wife I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic's grave.»
Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula's manner as she greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there would be three at lunch.
Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for the
«Got a telegram from Evan,» he told Paula. «Won't be back till the four o'clock day after to-morrow.»
«And after all my trouble!» she exclaimed. «Now the lilacs will be wilted and spoiled.»
Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank, straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always been that way—too transparent to make a success of deceit.
Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely interested interrogation.
«Why, in Graham's room,» she explained. «I had the boys bring a big armful and I arranged them all myself. He's so fond of them, you know.»
Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade's coming, and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried casually:
«Expecting anybody?»
He shook his head, and asked, «Are you doing anything this afternoon?»
«Haven't thought about anything,» she answered. «And now I suppose I can't plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish.»
«But you can,» Dick assured her. «I'm turning him over to Mr. Hanley, who's got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows all the grandfather bass by name. I'll tell you what—» He paused and considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. «It's a loafing afternoon. Let's take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I noticed the other day they've become populous on that hill above the Little Meadow.»
But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands and was herself.
«But don't take a rifle for me,» she said.
«If you'd rather not—» he began gently.
«Oh, I want to go, but I don't feel up to shooting. I'll take Le Gallienne's last book along—it just came in—and read to you in betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went squirreling it was his 'Quest of the Golden Girl' I read to you.»
CHAPTER XXV
Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House as nearly side by side as the Outlaw's wicked perversity permitted. The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick's restraint of rein and spur and win to a bite of Paula's leg or the Fawn's sleek flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and tried to whirl.
«This is the last year of her,» Dick announced. «She's indomitable. I've worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that some time she'll catch me napping, and for fear she'll miss that time she never lets any time go by.»
«And some time she may catch you,» Paula said.
«That's why I'm giving her up. It isn't exactly a strain on me, but soon or late she's bound to get me if there's anything in the law of probability. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up.»
«You're a wonder, Red Cloud,» Paula smiled.
«Why?»
«You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up by.»
«I'll be darned if I did,» he laughed back. «There was where all signs failed. I didn't have a statistic that applied to you. I merely acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her—»
«And got her,» Paula completed for him. «But since, Red Cloud, since.
Surely you've accumulated enough statistics on me.»
«A few, quite a few,» he admitted. «But I hope never to get the last one—»
He broke off at sound of the unmistakable nicker of Mountain Lad. The stallion appeared, the cowboy on his back, and Dick gazed for a moment at the perfect action of the beast's great swinging trot.
«We've got to get out of this,» he warned, as Mountain Lad, at sight of them, broke into a gallop.
Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while from behind they heard the soothing «Whoas» of the rider, the thuds of the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The Outlaw answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the commotion they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.
Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.
«He's never really injured anybody yet,» Paula said, as they started back.
«Except when he casually stepped on Cowley's toes. You remember he was laid up in bed for a month,» Dick reminded her, straightening out the Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange look with which Paula was regarding him.
There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear—yes, almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but, most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his thinking in statistics.
But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.
«They missed it,» he said. «It should have been repaired a month ago.»
«What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?» Paula inquired.
This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of starving to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in his wilder mountain pastures to the west.
«It's time to break them,» he answered. «And I'm thinking of a real old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and all the rest, and invite the country side?»
«And then you won't be there,» Paula objected.
«I'll take a day off. Is it a go?»
