“But, Sally, I meant to. You understood me? Say you didn't believe I could take that liberty without honorable intentions.”
That was too much for Sally. She jumped at her horse, made the quickest kind of a mount, and was off like a flash.
“Stop me if you can,” she called back over her shoulder, her face alight and saucy.
“Russ, go after her,” said Miss Sampson. “In that mood she'll ride to Sanderson. My dear fellow, don't stare so. I understand many things now. Sally is a flirt. She would drive any man mad. Russ, I've grown in a short time to like you. If you'll be a man—give up drinking and gambling—maybe you'll have a chance with her. Hurry now—go after her.”
I mounted and spurred my horse after Sally's. She was down on the level now, out in the open, and giving her mount his head. Even had I wanted to overhaul her at once the matter would have been difficult, well nigh impossible under five miles.
Sally had as fast a horse as there was on the range; she made no weight in the saddle, and she could ride. From time to time she looked back over her shoulder.
I gained enough to make her think I was trying to catch her. Sally loved a horse; she loved a race; she loved to win.
My good fortune had given me more than one ride alone with Sally. Miss Sampson enjoyed riding, too; but she was not a madcap, and when she accompanied us there was never any race.
When Sally got out alone with me she made me ride to keep her from disappearing somewhere on the horizon. This morning I wanted her to enjoy to the fullest her utter freedom and to feel that for once I could not catch her.
Perhaps my declaration to Miss Sampson had liberated my strongest emotions.
However that might be, the fact was that no ride before had ever been like this one—no sky so blue, no scene so open, free, and enchanting as that beautiful gray-green range, no wind so sweet. The breeze that rushed at me might have been laden with the perfume of Sally Langdon's hair.
I sailed along on what seemed a strange ride. Grazing horses pranced and whistled as I went by; jack-rabbits bounded away to hide in the longer clumps of grass; a prowling wolf trotted from his covert near a herd of cattle.
Far to the west rose the low, dark lines of bleak mountains. They were always mysterious to me, as if holding a secret I needed to know.
It was a strange ride because in the back of my head worked a haunting consciousness of the deadly nature of my business there on the frontier, a business in such contrast with this dreaming and dallying, this longing for what surely was futile.
Any moment I might be stripped of my disguise. Any moment I might have to be the Ranger.
Sally kept the lead across the wide plain, and mounted to the top of a ridge, where tired out, and satisfied with her victory, she awaited me. I was in no hurry to reach the summit of the long, slow-sloping ridge, and I let my horse walk.
Just how would Sally Langdon meet me now, after my regretted exhibition before her cousin? There was no use to conjecture, but I was not hopeful.
When I got there to find her in her sweetest mood, with some little difference never before noted—a touch of shyness—I concealed my surprise.
“Russ, I gave you a run that time,” she said. “Ten miles and you never caught me!”
“But look at the start you had. I've had my troubles beating you with an even break.”
Sally was susceptible to flattery in regard to her riding, a fact that I made subtle use of.
“But in a long race I was afraid you'd beat me. Russ, I've learned to ride out here. Back home I never had room to ride a horse. Just look. Miles and miles of level, of green. Little hills with black bunches of trees. Not a soul in sight. Even the town hidden in the green. All wild and lonely. Isn't it glorious, Russ?”
“Lately it's been getting to me,” I replied soberly.
We both gazed out over the sea of gray-green, at the undulating waves of ground in the distance. On these rides with her I had learned to appreciate the beauty of the lonely reaches of plain.
But when I could look at her I seldom wasted time on scenery. Looking at her now I tried to get again that impression of a difference in her. It eluded me.
Just now with the rose in her brown cheeks, her hair flying, her eyes with grave instead of mocking light, she seemed only prettier than usual. I got down ostensibly to tighten the saddle girths on her horse. But I lingered over the task.
Presently, when she looked down at me, I received that subtle impression of change, and read it as her soft mood of dangerous sweetness that came so seldom, mingled with something deeper, more of character and womanliness than I had ever sensed in her.
“Russ, it wasn't nice to tell Diane that,” she said.
“Nice! It was—oh, I'd like to swear!” I ejaculated. “But now I understand my miserable feeling. I was jealous, Sally, I'm sorry. I apologize.”
She had drawn off her gloves, and one little hand, brown, shapely, rested upon her knee very near to me. I took it in mine. She let it stay, though she looked away from me, the color rich in her cheeks.
“I can forgive that,” she murmured. “But the lie. Jealousy doesn't excuse a lie.”
“You mean—what I intimated to your cousin,” I said, trying to make her look at me. “That was the devil in me. Only it's true.”
“How can it be true when you never asked—said a word—you hinted of?” she queried. “Diane believed what
