The Mysterious Rider

God pity me!”

Blindly Columbine reeled out of her saddle and slowly dropped to the grass, where she burst into a violent storm of sobs and tears. It shook her every fiber. It was hopeless, terrible grief. The dry grass received her flood of tears and her incoherent words.

Wade dismounted and, kneeling beside her, placed a gentle hand upon her heaving shoulder, but he spoke no word. By and by, when the storm had begun to subside, he raised her head.

“Lass, nothin' is ever so bad as it seems,” he said, softly. “Come, sit up. Let me talk to you.”

“Oh, Ben, something terriblehas happened,” she cried. “It's in me ! I don't know what it is. But it'll kill me.”

“I know,” he replied, as her head fell upon his shoulder. “Miss Collie, I'm an old fellow that's had everythin' happen to him, an' I'm livin' yet, tryin' to help people along. No one dies so easy. Why, you're a fine, strong girl—an' somethin' tells me you was made for happiness. I know how things turn out. Listen—”

“But, Ben—you don't know—about me,” she sobbed. “I've told you—I—hate Jack Belllounds. But I've—got to marry him!... His father raised me—from a baby. He brought me up. I owe him—my life.... I've no relation—no mother—no father! No one loves me—for myself!”

“Nobody loves you!” echoed Wade, with an exquisite tone of repudiation. “Strange how people fool themselves! Lass, you're huggin' your troubles too hard. An' you're wrong. Why, everybody loves you! Lem an' Jim —why you just brighten the hard world they live in. An' that poor, hot-headed Jack—he loves you as well as he can love anythin'. An' the old man—no daughter could be loved more.... An' I—I love you, lass, just like—as if you— might have been my own. I'm goin' to be the friend—the brother you need. An' I reckon I can come somewheres near bein' a mother, if you'll let me.”

Something, some subtle power or charm, stole over Columbine, assuaging her terrible sense of loss, of grief. There was tenderness in this man's hands, in his voice, and through them throbbed strong and passionate life and spirit.

“Do you really love me—loveme?” she whispered, somehow comforted, somehow feeling that what he offered was what she had missed as a child. “And you want to be all that for me?”

“Yes, lass, an' I reckon you'd better try me.”

“Oh, how good you are! I felt that—the very first time I was with you. I've wanted to come to you—to tell you my troubles. I love dad and he loves me, but he doesn't understand. Dad is wrapped up in his son. I've had no one. I never had any one.”

“You have some one now,” returned Wade, with a rich, deep mellowness in his voice that soothed Columbine and made her wonder. “An' because I've been through so much I can tell you what'll help you.... Lass, if a woman isn't big an' brave, how will a man ever be? There's more in women than in men. Life has given you a hard knock, placin' you here—no real parents—an' makin' you responsible to a man whose only fault is blinded love for his son. Well, you've got to meet it, face it, with what a woman has more of than any man. Courage! Suppose you do hate this Buster Jack. Suppose you do love this poor, crippled Wilson Moore.... Lass, don't look like that! Don't deny. You do love that boy.... Well, it's hell. But you can never tell what'll happen when you're honest and square. If you feel it your duty to pay your debt to the old man you call dad—to pay it by marryin' his son, why do it, an' be a woman. There's nothin' as great as a woman can be. There's happiness that comes in strange, unheard-of ways. There's more in this life than what you want most.You didn't place yourself in this fix. So if you meet it with courage an' faithfulness to yourself, why, it'll not turn out as you dread.... Some day, if you ever think you're broken-hearted, I'll tell you my story. An' then you'll not think your lot so hard. For I've had a broken heart an' ruined life, an' yet I've lived on an' on, findin' happiness I never dreamed would come, fightin' or workin'. An' how I found the world beautiful, an' how I love the flowers an' hills an' wild things so well—that, just that would be enough to live for!... An' think, lass, of what a wonderful happiness will come to me in showin' all this to you. That'll be the crownin' glory. An' if it's that much to me, then you be sure there's nothin' on earth I won't do for you.”

Columbine lifted her tear-stained face with a light of inspiration.

“Oh, Wilson was right!” she murmured. “You are Heaven-sent! And I'm going to love you!”

CHAPTER IX

A new spirit, or a liberation of her own, had fired Columbine, and was now burning within her, unquenchable and unutterable. Some divine spark had penetrated into that mysterious depth of her, to inflame and to illumine, so that when she arose from this hour of calamity she felt that to the tenderness and sorrow and fidelity in her soul had been added the lightning flash of passion.

“Oh, Ben—shall I be able to hold onto this?” she cried, flinging wide her arms, as if to embrace the winds of heaven.

“This what, lass?” he asked.

“This—thiswoman! ” she answered, passionately, with her hands sweeping back to press her breast.

“No woman who wakes ever goes back to a girl again,” he said, sadly.

“I wanted to die—and now I want to live—to fight.... Ben, you've uplifted me. I was little, weak, miserable.... But in my dreams, or in some state I can't remember or understand, I've waited for your very words. I was ready. It's as if I knew you in some other world, before I was born on this earth; and when you spoke to me here, so wonderfully—as my mother might have spoken—my heart leaped up in recognition of you and your call to my womanhood!... Oh, how strange and beautiful!”

“Miss Collie,” he replied, slowly, as he bent to his saddle-straps, “you're young, an' you've no understandin' of what's strange an' terrible in life. An' beautiful, too, as you say.... Who knows? Maybe in some former state I was somethin' to you. I believe in that. Reckon I can't say how or what. Maybe we were flowers or birds. I've a weakness for that idea.”

“Birds! I like the thought, too,” replied Columbine. “I love most birds. But there are hawks, crows, buzzards!”

“I reckon. Lass, there's got to be balance in nature. If it weren't for the ugly an' the evil, we wouldn't know the beautiful an' good.... An' now let's ride home. It's gettin' late.”

“Ben, ought I not go back to Wilson right now?” she asked, slowly.