“If I was fool enough to lose it that way, I won't take it back.”
“I knew that, too—I guessed it. Oh, Terry, I know a pile more about the inside of your head than you'd ever guess! Well, I knew that—and I come with the money so's you can pay back Dad in the morning. Here it is—and they's just a mite more to help you on your way.”
She laid the little handful of gold on the table beside the bed and rose.
“Don't go,” said Terry, when he could speak. “Don't go, Kate! I'm not that low. I can't take your money!”
She stood by the bed and stamped lightly. “Are you going to be a fool about this, too?”
“Your father offered to give me back all the money I'd won. I can't do it, Kate.”
He could see her grow angry, beautifully angry.
“Is they no difference between Kate Pollard and Joe Pollard?”
Something leaped into his throat. He wanted to tell her in a thousand ways just how vast that difference was.
“Man, you'd make a saint swear, and I ain't a saint by some miles. You take that money and pay Dad, and get on your way. This ain't no place for you, Terry Hollis.”
“I—” he began.
She broke in: “Don't say it. You'll have me mad in a minute. Don't say it.”
“I have to. I can't take money from you.”
“Then take a loan.”
He shook his head.
“Ain't I good enough to even loan you money?” she cried fiercely.
The shaft of moonlight had poured past her feet; she stood in a pool of it.
“Good enough?” said Terry. “Good enough?” Something that had been accumulating in him now swelled to bursting, flooded from his heart to his throat. He hardly knew his own voice, it was so transformed with sudden emotion.
“There's more good in you than in any man or woman I've ever known.”
“Terry, are you trying to make me feel foolish?”
“I mean it—and it's true. You're kinder, more gentle—”
“Gentle? Me? Oh, Terry!”
But she sat down on the bed, and she listened to him with her face raised, as though music were falling on her, a thing barely heard at a perilous distance.
“They've told you other things, but they don't know. I know, Kate. The moment I saw you I knew, and it stopped my heart for a beat—the knowing of it. That you're beautiful—and true as steel; that you're worthy of honor—and that I honor you with all my heart. That I love your kindness, your frankness, your beautiful willingness to help people, Kate. I've lived with a woman who taught me what was true. You've taught me what's glorious and worth living for. Do you understand, Kate?”
And no answer; but a change in her face that stopped him.
“I shouldn't of come,” she whispered at length, “and I—I shouldn't have let you—talk the way you've done. But, oh, Terry—when you come to forget what you've said—don't forget it all the way—keep some of the things— tucked away in you—somewhere—”
She rose from the bed and slipped across the white brilliance of the shaft of moonlight. It made a red-gold fire of her hair. Then she flickered into the shadow. Then she was swallowed by the darkness.
CHAPTER 28
There was no Kate at breakfast the next morning. She had left the house at dawn with her horse.
“May be night before she comes back,” said her father. “No telling how far she'll go. May be tomorrow before she shows up.”
It made Terry thoughtful for reasons which he himself did not understand. He had a peculiar desire to climb into the saddle on El Sangre and trail her across the hills. But he was very quickly brought to the reality that if he chose to make himself a laboring man and work out the three hundred dollars he would not take back from Joe Pollard, the big man was now disposed to make him live up to his word.
He was sent out with an ax and ordered to attack a stout grove of the pines for firewood. But he quickly resigned himself to the work. Whatever gloom he felt disappeared with the first stroke that sunk the edge deep into the soft wood. The next stroke broke out a great chip, and a resinous, fresh smell came up to him.
He made quick work of the first tree, working the morning chill out of his body, and as he warmed to his labor, the long muscles of arms and shoulders limbering, the blows fell in a shower. The sturdy pines fell one by one, and he stripped them of branches with long, sweeping blows of the ax, shearing off several at a stroke. He was not an expert axman, but he knew enough about that cunning craft to make his blows tell, and a continual desire to sing welled up in him.
Once, to breathe after the heavy labor, he stepped to the edge of the little grove. The sun was sparkling in the tops of the trees; the valley dropped far away below him. He felt as one who stands on the top of the world. There was flash and gleam of red; there stood El Sangre in the corral below him; the stallion raised his head and whinnied in reply to the master's whistle.
A great, sweet peace dropped on the heart of Terry Hollis. Now he felt he was at home. He went back to his work.
