The wounds of the young men healed rapidly, and both of them foresaw that the day of their departure could no longer be postponed. Neither of them was yet in condition to walk very far, but on horseback they were fit to travel carefully.

"We got all the time there is. No need of pushin' on the reins, but I reckon the old man isn't payin' us fifty dollars a month to hold down the Roubideau porch," said Prince regretfully.

"No, we gotta light a shuck," admitted Jim, with no noticeable alacrity.

He was in no hurry to leave himself, even if he did not happen to be in love.

Billie put his fortune to the touch while he was out with Polly rounding up some calves. They were riding knee to knee in the dust of the drag through a small arroyo.

The cowpuncher swallowed once or twice in a dry throat and blurted out, "I got something to tell you before I go, Polly."

The girl flashed a look at him. She recognized the symptoms. Her gaze went back to the wavelike motion of the backs of the moving yearlings.

"Don't, Billie," she said gently.

Before he spoke again he thought over her advice. He knew he had his answer. But he had to go through with it now.

"I reckoned it would be that way. I'm nothin' but a rough vaquero. Whyfor should you like me?"

"Oh, but I do!" she cried impulsively. "I like you a great deal. You're one of the best men I know--brave and good and modest. It isn't that; Billie."

"Is there--some one else? Or oughtn't I to ask that?"

"No, there's n.o.body else. I'm awfully glad you like me. The girl that gets you will be lucky. But I don't care about men that way. I want to stay with dad and Jean."

"Mebbe some day you may feel different about it."

"Mebbe I will," she agreed. "Anyhow, I want you to stay friends with me.

You will, won't you?"

"Sure. I'll be there just as long as you want me for a friend," he said simply.

She gave him her little gauntleted hand. They were close to a bend in the draw. Soon they would be within sight of the house.

"I'd say 'Yes' if I could, Billie. I'd rather it would be you than anybody else. You won't feel bad, will you?"

"Oh, that's all right." He smiled, and there was something about the pluck of the eyes in the lean, tanned face that touched her. "I'm goin'

to keep right on carin' for my little pal even if I can't get what I want."

She had not yet fully emerged from her childhood. There was in her a strong desire to comfort him somehow, to show by a mark of special favor how high she held him in her esteem.

"Would you--would you like to kiss me?" she asked simply.

He felt a clamor of the blood and subdued it before he answered. It was in accord with the charm she held for him that her frank generosity enhanced his respect for her. If she gave a royal gift it was out of the truth of her heart.

Without need of words she read acceptance in his eyes and leaned toward him in the saddle. Their lips met.

"You're the first--except dad and Jean," she told him.

The feeling in his primitive heart he could not have a.n.a.lyzed. He did not know that his soul was moved to some such consecration as that of a young knight taking his vow of service, though he was aware that all the good in him leaped to instant response in her presence, that by some strange spiritual alchemy he had pa.s.sed through a refining process.

"I'm comin' back to see you some day. Mebbe you'll feel different then,"

he said.

"I might," she admitted.

They rounded the bend. Clanton, on horseback, caught sight of them. He waved his hat and cantered forward.

"Say, Billie, how much bacon do you reckon we need to take with us?"

In front of the house Pauline slipped from her horse and left them discussing the commissary.

Chapter VII

On the Trail

The convalescents rode away into a desert green with spring. The fragrant chaparral thickets were bursting into flower. Spanish bayonets studded the plains. Everywhere about them was the promise of a new life not yet burnt by hot summer suns to a crisp.

During the day they ran into a swamp country and crossed a bayou where cypress knees and blue gums showed fantastic in the eerie gloom of the stagnant water. From this they emerged to a more wooded region and made an early camp on the edge of a grove of ash trees bordering a small stream where pecans grew thick.

Shortly after daybreak they were jogging on at a walk-trot, the road gait of the Southwest, into the treeless country of the prairie. They nooned at an arroyo seco, and after they had eaten took a siesta during the heat of the day. Night brought with it a thunderstorm and they took refuge in a Mexican hut built of palisades and roofed with gra.s.s sod. A widow lived alone in the jacal, but she made them welcome to the best she had. The young men slept in a corner of the hut on a dry cowskin spread upon the mud floor, their saddles for pillows and their blankets rolled about them.

While she was cooking their breakfast, Prince noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks. She was a comely young woman and he asked her gallantly in the bronco Spanish of the border if there was anything he could do to relieve her distress.

She shook her head mournfully. "No, senor," she answered in her native tongue. "Only time can do that. I mourn my husband. He was a drunken ne'er-do-well, but he was my man. So I mourn a fitting period. He died in that corner of the room where you slept."

"Indeed! When?" asked Billie politely.

"Ten days ago. Of smallpox."

The young men never ate that breakfast. They fled into the sunlight and put many hurried miles between them and their amazed hostess. At the first stream they stripped, bathed, washed their clothes, dipped the saddles, and lay nude in the warm sand until their wearing apparel was dry.

For many days they joked each other about that headlong flight, but underneath their gayety was a dread which persisted.

"I'm like Dona Isabel with her grief. Only time can heal me of that scare she threw into Billie Prince," the owner of that name confessed.

"Me too," a.s.sented Clanton, helping himself to pinole. "I'll bet I lost a year's growth, and me small at that."

Prince had been in the employ of Webb for three years. During the long hours when they rode side by side he told his companion much about the Flying V Y outfit and its owner.

"He's a straight-up man, Homer Webb is. His word is good all over Texas.

He'll sure do to take along," said Billie by way of recommendation.

"And Joe Yankie--does he stack up A 1 too?" asked the boy dryly.