shining light in her eyes, and the face filled with delight, he
would scarcely have believed that it belonged to a young woman he
had known in the office, the young woman with the controlled,
subdued office face
“I didn’t know you rode,” was one of her first remarks. “I
imagined you were wedded to get-there-quick machines.”
“I’ve just taken it up lately,” was his answer. “Beginning to
get stout; you know, and had to take it off somehow.”
She gave a quick sidewise glance that embraced him from head to
heel, including seat and saddle, and said:–
“But you’ve ridden before.”
She certainly had an eye for horses and things connected with
horses was his thought, as he replied:-
“Not for many years. But I used to think I was a regular
rip-snorter when I was a youngster up in Eastern Oregon, sneaking
away from camp to ride with the cattle and break cayuses and
that sort of thing.”
Thus, and to his great relief, were they launched on a topic of
mutual interest. He told her about Bob’s tricks, and of the
whirl and his scheme to overcome it; and she agreed that horses
had to be handled with a certain rational severity, no matter how
much one loved them. There was her Mab, which she had for eight
years and which she had had break of stall-kicking. The process
had been painful for Mab, but it had cured her.
“You’ve ridden a lot,” Daylight said.
“I really can’t remember the first time I was on a horse,” she
told him. “I was born on a ranch, you know, and they couldn’t
keep me away from the horses. I must have been born with the
love for them. I had my first pony, all my own, when I was six.
When I was eight I knew what it was to be all day in the saddle
along with Daddy. By the time I was eleven he was taking me on
my first deer hunts. I’d be lost without a horse. I hate
indoors, and without Mab here I suppose I’d have been sick and
dead long ago.”
“You like the country?” he queried, at the same moment catching
his first glimpse of a light in her eyes other than gray. “As
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much as I detest the city,” she answered. “But a woman can’t
earn a living in the country. So I make the best of it–along
with Mab.”
And thereat she told him more of her ranch life in the days
before her father died. And Daylight was hugely pleased with
himself. They were getting acquainted. The conversation had not
lagged in the full half hour they had been together.
“We come pretty close from the same part of the country,” he
said. “I was raised in Eastern Oregon, and that’s none so far
from Siskiyou.”
The next moment he could have bitten out his tongue for her quick
question was:–
“How did you know I came from Siskiyou? I’m sure I never
mentioned it.”
“I don’t know,” he floundered temporarily. “I heard somewhere
that you were from thereabouts.”
Wolf, sliding up at that moment, sleek-footed and like a shadow,
caused her horse to shy and passed the awkwardness off, for they
talked Alaskan dogs until the conversation drifted back to
horses. And horses it was, all up the grade and down the other
side.
When she talked, he listened and followed her, and yet all the
while he was following his own thoughts and impressions as well.
It was a nervy thing for her to do, this riding astride, and he
didn’t know, after all, whether he liked it or not. His ideas of
women were prone to be old-fashioned; they were the ones he had
imbibed in the early-day, frontier life of his youth, when no
woman was seen on anything but a side-saddle. He had grown up to
the tacit fiction that women on horseback were not bipeds. It
came to him with a shock, this sight of her so manlike in her
saddle. But he had to confess that the sight looked good to him
just
Two other immediate things about her struck him. First, there
were the golden spots in her eyes. Queer that he had never
noticed them before. Perhaps the light in the office had not
been right, and perhaps they came and went. No; they were glows
of color–a sort of diffused, golden light. Nor was it golden,
either, but it was nearer that than any color he knew. It
certainly was not any shade of yellow. A lover’s thoughts are
ever colored, and it is to be doubted if any one else in the
world would have called Dede’s eyes golden. But Daylight’s mood
verged on the tender and melting, and he preferred to think of
them as golden, and therefore they were golden.
And then she was so natural. He had been prepared to find her a
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most difficult young woman to get acquainted with. Yet here it
was proving so simple. There was nothing highfalutin about her
company manners–it was by this homely phrase that he
differentiated this Dede on horseback from the Dede with the
office manners whom he had always known. And yet, while he was
delighted with the smoothness with which everything was going,
and with the fact that they had found plenty to talk about, he
was aware of an irk under it all. After all, this talk was empty
and idle. He was a man of action, and he wanted her, Dede Mason,
the woman; he wanted her to love him and to be loved by him; and
he wanted all this glorious consummation then and there. Used to
forcing issues used to gripping men and things and bending them
to his will, he felt, now, the same compulsive prod of mastery.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her and that there was
nothing else for her to do but marry him. And yet he did not
obey the prod. Women were fluttery creatures, and here mere
mastery would prove a bungle. He remembered all his hunting
guile, the long patience of shooting meat in famine when a hit or
a miss meant life or death. Truly, though this girl did not yet
mean quite that, nevertheless she meant much to him–more, now,
than ever, as he rode beside her, glancing at her as often as he
dared, she in her corduroy riding-habit, so bravely manlike, yet
so essentially and revealingly woman, smiling, laughing, talking,
her eyes sparkling, the flush of a day of sun and summer breeze
warm in her cheeks.
CHAPTER XIII
Another Sunday man and horse and dog roved the Piedmont hills.
And again Daylight and Dede rode together. But this time her
surprise at meeting him was tinctured with suspicion; or rather,
her surprise was of another order. The previous Sunday had been
quite accidental, but his appearing a second time among her
favorite haunts hinted of more than the fortuitous. Daylight was
made to feel that she suspected him, and he, remembering that he
had seen a big rock quarry near Blair Park, stated offhand that
he was thinking of buying it. His one-time investment in a
brickyard had put the idea into his head–an idea that he decided
was a good one, for it enabled him to suggest that she ride along
with him to inspect the quarry.
So several hours he spent in her company, in which she was much
the same girl as before, natural, unaffected, lighthearted,
smiling and laughing, a good fellow, talking horses with
unflagging enthusiasm, making friends with the crusty-tempered
Wolf, and expressing the desire to ride Bob, whom she declared
she was more in love with than ever. At this last Daylight
demurred. Bob was full of dangerous tricks, and he wouldn’t
trust any one on him except his worst enemy.
“You think, because I’m a girl, that I don’t know anything
about horses,” she flashed back. “But I’ve been thrown off and
bucked off enough not to be over-confident. And I’m not a fool.
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I wouldn’t get on a bucking horse. I’ve learned better. And I’m
not afraid of any other kind. And you say yourself that Bob
doesn’t buck.”
“But you’ve never seen him cutting up didoes,” Daylight
“But you must remember I’ve seen a few others, and I’ve been on
several of them myself. I brought Mab here to electric cars,
locomotives, and automobiles. She was a raw range colt when she
came to me. Broken to saddle that was all. Besides, I won’t
hurt your horse.”
Against his better judgment, Daylight gave in, and, on an
unfrequented stretch of road, changed saddles and bridles.
“Remember, he’s greased lightning,” he warned, as he helped her
to mount.
She nodded, while Bob pricked up his ears to the knowledge that
he had a strange rider on his back. The fun came quickly