With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up, grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.

"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.

She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character.

"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!

Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"

Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain.

"And Firio rides Wrath of G.o.d," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable, whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature.

There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the cheerful humor of Jag Ear."

"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned his name."

Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear pa.s.sed into kindlier hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had availed him nothing.

"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him, everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings back and forth."

While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of G.o.d and, with Jag Ear's bells jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an intimacy of a.s.sociation impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in some Utopian kindergarten.

Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for him in Little Rivers, now a dark ma.s.s on the levels, just dark, without color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection from Pete Leddy's six-shooter.

"I--I have a right to know--won't you tell me how you are going to defend yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst.

"I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy thinking out how I was going to break a piece of news to Firio. I have been an awful coward about it, putting it off and putting it off. I had planned to do it on my birthday two weeks ago, and then he gave me these big silver spurs--spent a whole month's wages on them, think of that! I bought this cowboy regalia to go with them. You can't imagine how that pleased him. It certainly was great fun."

Mary could only shake her head hopelessly.

"Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of G.o.d and old P.D. here--we've sort of grown used to one another's foolishness. Now I can't put it off any longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going East in the morning."

"You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through the clouds.

"Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride."

Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.

"Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a compa.s.s. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of the ponies in the sand.

"That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about anything."

Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out to the pa.s.s. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices.

"That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return from the pa.s.s."

She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he should accept.

"Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.

She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could look in on the group of idling male gossips.

"Don't!"

It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria? The loungers suddenly dropped to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand and Leddy's hard, unyielding face.

What matter if the easy traveller could shoot? He was caught like a man coming out of an alley. He had no chance to draw in turn. In the click of a second-hand the thing would be over. Mary's eyes involuntarily closed, to avoid seeing the flash from the revolver. She listened for the report; for the fall of a body which should express the horror she had visualized for the hundredth time. A century seemed to pa.s.s and there was no sound except the beat of her heart, which ran in a cataract throb to her temples; no sound except that and what seemed to be soft, regular steps on the bare floor of the store.

"Coward!" she told herself, with the agony of her suspense breaking. "He saved you from inexpressible humiliation and you are afraid even to look!"

She opened her eyes, prepared for the worst. Had she gone out of her head? Could she no longer trust her own eyesight? What she saw was inconceivable. The startled faces of the loungers were rising from behind the boxes and barrels. Pete Leddy's gun had dropped to his side and his would-be victim had a hand on Pete's shoulder. Jack was talking apparently in a kindly and reasoning tone, but she could not make out his words.

One man alone evidently had not taken cover. It was Jim Galway, a rancher, who had been standing at the mail counter. To judge by his expression, what Jack was saying had his approval.

With a nod to Leddy and then a nod to the others, as if in amicable conclusion of the affair, Jack wheeled around to the counter, disclosing Leddy's face wry with insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released, he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning, puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke and Galway spoke in answer. Evidently he was asking that Leddy be released. To this Galway consented at length, but without drawing back until he had seen Leddy's gun safe in the holster.

Then Leddy raised himself challengingly on tiptoes to Jack, who turned to Galway in the manner of one extending an invitation. On his part, Leddy turned to Ropey Smith, another of Little Rivers' ruffians. After this, Leddy went through the door at the rear; the loungers resumed their seats on the cracker barrels and gazed at one another with dropped jaws, while Bill Lang proceeded with his business as postmaster.

IV

HE CARRIES THE MAIL

When the suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the same careless, pleasant voice which she had heard at Galeria asking Pete Leddy if he were not overplaying his part.

"You were right," said the voice. "It was the whistle that made him so angry."

Indistinctly she a.s.sociated a slowly-shaping figure with the voice and realized that she had been away in the unknown for a second. Yes, it was all very well to talk about Sir Walter being out of fashion, but she had been near to fainting, and in none of the affectation of the hoop-skirt age, either. Had she done any foolish thing in expression of a weakness that she had never known before? Had she extended her hand for support?

Had he caught her as she wobbled in the saddle? No. She was relieved to see that he was not near enough for that.

"By no stretch of ethics can you charge yourself with further responsibility or fears," he continued. "Pete and I understand each other perfectly, now."

But in his jocularity ran something which was plain, if unspoken. It was that he would put an end to a disagreeable subject. His first words to her had provided a bridge--and burned it--from the bank of the disagreeable to the bank of agreeable. Her own desire, with full mastery of her faculties coming swiftly, fell in with his. She wanted to blot out that horror and scotch a sudden uprising of curiosity as to the exact nature of the gamble in death through which he had pa.s.sed. It was enough that he was alive.

The blurry figure became distinct, smiling with inquiry in a glance from her to the stack of papers, magazines, and pamphlets which crowded his circling arms. He seemed to have emptied the post-office. There had not been any Pete Leddy; there had been no display of six-shooters. He had gone in after the mail. Here he was ready to deliver it by the bushel, while he waited for orders. She had to laugh at his predicament as he lowered his chin to steady a book on the top of the pile.

"Oh, I meant to tell you that you were not to bring the second-cla.s.s matter!" she told him. "We always send a servant with a basket for that.

You see what comes of having a father who is not only omnivorous, but has a herbivorous capacity."

He saw that the book had a row of Italian stamps across the wrapper.

Unless that popular magazine stopped slipping, both the book and a heavy German pamphlet would go. He took two hasty steps toward her, in mock distress of appeal.

"I'll allow salvage if you act promptly!" he said.

She lifted the tottering apex just in time to prevent its fall.

"I'll take the book," she said. "Father has been waiting months for it. We can separate the letters and leave the rest in the store to be sent for."