"Why not, dear?" he asked, tenderly.

"Because--because--" She turned in a swift, overmastering impulse.

"Because if you do, I must give you back your ring." She wrung it from her finger. "I think I must, anyhow."

As she crowded the gem into his lax hand he said: "Why, what does this mean, Elsie Bee Bee?" His voice expressed pain and bewilderment.

"I don't know _what_ it means yet, only I feel that it isn't right now to wear it. I told you when you put it on that it implied no promise on my part."

"I know it, and it doesn't imply any now."

"Yes, it does. Your whole att.i.tude towards me implies an absolute engagement, and I can't rest under that. Take back your ring till I can receive it as other girls do--as a binding promise. You _must_ do this or I will hate you!" she added, with a sudden fury.

"Why, certainly, dearest--only I don't see what has produced this change in you."

"I have not changed--you have changed."

He laughed at this. "The woman's last word! Well, I admit it. I have come to love you as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife.

I'm going to care a great deal, Elsie Bee Bee, if you do not come to me some time."

"Don't say that!" she cried, and there was an imploring accent in her voice. "Don't you see I must not wear your ring till I promise all you ask?"

They walked on in silence to the door. As they stood there he said: "I feel as though I were about to say good-bye to you forever, and it makes my heart ache."

She put both hands on his shoulders, then, swift as a bird, turned and was gone. He felt that she had thought to kiss him, but he divined it would have been a farewell kiss, and he was glad that she had turned away. There was still hope for him in that indecision.

As for Elsie, life seemed suddenly less simple and less orderly. She pitied Osborne, she was angry and dissatisfied with herself, and in doubt about Curtis. "I'm not in love with him--it is impossible, absurd; but my summer is spoiled. I shall go home at once. It is foolish for me to be here when I could be at the sea-sh.o.r.e."

After a moment she thought: "Why am I here? I guess the girls were right. I _am_ a crank--an irresponsible. Why should I want to paint these malodorous tepee dwellers? Just to be different from any one else."

As she sat at her open window she heard again the Tetong lover's flute wailing from the hill-side across the stream, and the sound struck straight in upon her heart and filled her with a mysterious longing--a pain which she dared not a.n.a.lyze. Her mind was active to the point of confusion--seething with doubts and the wreckage of her opinions.

Lawson's action had deeply disturbed her.

They had never pretended to sentiment in their relationship; indeed, she had settled into a conviction that love was a silly pa.s.sion, possible only to girls in their teens. This belief she had attained by pa.s.sing through what seemed to her a fiery furnace of suffering at eighteen, and when that self-effacing pa.s.sion had burned itself out she had renounced love and marriage and "devoted herself to art," healing herself with work. For some years thereafter she posed as a man-hater.

The objective cause of all this tumult and flame and renunciation seemed ridiculously inadequate in the eyes of others. He was the private secretary of Senator Stollwaert at the time, a smug, discreet, pretty man, of slender attainment and no great ambition. Happily, he had afterwards removed to New York, or Washington would have been an impossible place of residence for Elsie. She had met him once since her return--he had had the courage to call upon her--and the familiar pose of his small head and the mincing stride of his slender legs had given her a feeling of nausea. "Is it possible that I once agonized over this trig little man?" she asked herself.

To be just to him, Mr. Garretson did not presume in the least on his previous intimacy; on the contrary, he seemed timid and ill at ease in the presence of the woman whose beauty had by no means been foreshadowed in her girlhood. He was not stupid; the splendor of her surroundings awed him, but above all else there was a look on her face which too plainly expressed contempt for her ancient folly. Her shame was as perceptible to him as though expressed in spoken words, and his visit was never repeated.

Of this affair Elsie had spoken quite freely to Lawson. "It only shows what an unmitigated idiot a girl is. She is bound to love some one. I knew quant.i.ties of nice boys, and why I should have selected poor Sammy as the centre of all my hopes and affections I don't know. I dimly recall thinking he had nice ears and hands, but even they do not now seem a reasonable basis for wild pa.s.sion, do they?"

Lawson had been amused. "Love at that age isn't a creature of reason."

"Evidently not, if mine was a sample."

"Ours now is so reasonable as to seem insecure and dangerous."

Her intimacy with Lawson, therefore, had begun on the plane of good-fellowship while they were in Paris together, and for two years he seemed quite satisfied. Of late he had been less contained.

After her outburst of anger at her father's ejectment of Curtis, she met Lawson with a certain reserve not common to her. At the moment, she more than half resolved that the time had come to leave her father's house for Lawson's flat, and yet her will wavered. She said as little as possible to him concerning that last disgraceful scene, as much on her own account as to spare Curtis, but her restlessness was apparent to Lawson and puzzled him. Two or three times during the summer he had openly, though jocularly, alluded to their marriage, but she had put him off with a keen word. Now that her father seemed intolerable, she listened to him with a new interest. He became a definite possibility--a refuge.

Encouraged by this slight change in her att.i.tude towards him, Lawson took a ring from his pocket one night and said, "I wish you'd wear this, Elsie Bee Bee."

She drew back. "I can't do that. I'm not ready to promise anything yet."

"It needn't bind you," he pleaded. "It needn't mean any more than you care to have it mean. But I think our understanding justifies a ring."

"That's just it," she answered, quickly. "I don't like you to be so solemn about our 'understanding.' You promised to let me think it all out in my own way and in my own time."

"I know I did--and I mean to do so. Only"--he smiled with a wistful look at her--"I would have you observe that I have developed three gray hairs over my ears."

She took the ring slowly, and as she put the tip of her finger into it a slight premonitory shudder pa.s.sed over her.

"You are sure you understand--this is no binding promise on my part?"

"It will leave you as free as before."

"Then I will wear it," she said, and slipped it to its place. "It is a beautiful ring."

He bent and kissed her fingers. "And a beautiful hand, Elsie Bee Bee."

Now, lying alone in the soundless deep of the night, she went over that scene, and the one through which she had just pa.s.sed. "He's a dear, good fellow, and I love him--but not like that." And the thought that it was all over between them, and the decision irrevocably made, was at once a pain and a pleasure. The promise, slight as it was, had been a burden. "Now I am absolutely free," she said, in swift, exultant rebound.

XIX

THE SHERIFF'S MOB

The next day was cloudless, with a south wind, and the little, crawling brook which watered the agency seemed about to seethe. The lower foot-hills were already sere as autumn, and the ponies came down to their drinking-places unnaturally thirsty; and the cattle, wallowing in the creek-bed, seemed at times to almost stop its flow. The timid trees which Curtis had planted around the school-house and office were plainly suffering for lack of moisture, and the little gardens which the Indians had once more been induced to plant were in sore distress.

The torrid sun beat down into the valley from the unclouded sky so fiercely that the idle young men of the reservation postponed their horse-racing till after sunset. Curtis felt the heat and dust very keenly on his guests' account, and was irritated over the a.s.saults of the cattlemen. "If they had but kept the peace we would still be in the cool, sweet hills," he said to Lawson.

"This will not last," Lawson replied. "We'll get a mountain wind to-night. The girls are wisely keeping within doors and are not yet aware of the extreme heat."

"I hope you are a true prophet. But at this moment it seems as if no cool wind could arise out of this sun-baked land."

"Any news from the Willow?"

"The trouble was in the West Fort. Some cowboys raided a camp of Tetongs. No one was injured, and so it must pa.s.s for a joke."

"Some of those jokes will set something afire some of these hot days."

"But you know how hard it is to apprehend the ruffians; they come and go in the night like wolves. They spoiled our outing, but I hope we may get away again next week."

In the days which followed, Curtis saw little of Elsie, and when they met she seemed cold and preoccupied. In conversation she seemed listening to another voice, appeared to be pondering some abstract subject, and Curtis was puzzled and vaguely saddened. Jennie took a far less serious view of the estrangement. "It's just a mood. We've set her thinking; she's 'under conviction,' as the revivalists used to say.

Don't bother her and she'll 'come through.'"