第77章

Slone's heart leaped to his throat, and its beating choked his utterances of rapture and amaze and dread.But rapture dominated the other emotions.He could scarcely control the impulse to run to meet Lucy, without a single cautious thought.

He put the precious letter inside his blouse, where it seemed to warm his breast.He buckled on his gun-belt, and, extinguishing the light, he hurried out.

A crescent moon had just tipped the bluff.The village lanes and cabins and trees lay silver in the moon-light.A lonesome coyote barked in the distance.

All else was still.The air was cool, sweet, fragrant.There appeared to be a glamour of light, of silence, of beauty over the desert.

Slone kept under the dark lee of the bluff and worked around so that he could be above the village, where there was little danger of meeting any one.Yet presently he had to go out of the shadow into the moon-blanched lane.Swift and silent as an Indian he went along, keeping in the shade of what trees there were, until he came to the grove of cottonwoods.The grove was a black mystery lanced by silver rays.He slipped in among the trees, halting every few steps to listen.The action, the realization had helped to make him cool, to steel him, though never before in his life had he been so exalted.The pursuit and capture of Wildfire, at one time the desire of his heart, were as nothing to this.Love had called him--and life--and he knew death hung in the balance.If Bostil found him seeking Lucy there would be blood spilled.Slone quaked at the thought, for the cold and ghastly oppression following the death he had meted out to Sears came to him at times.But such thoughts were fleeting; only one thought really held his mind--and the one was that Lucy loved him, had sent strange, wild, passionate words to him.

He found the narrow path, its white crossed by slowly moving black bars of shadow, and stealthily he followed this, keen of eye and ear, stopping at every rustle.He well knew the bench Lucy had mentioned.It was in a remote corner of the grove, under big trees near the spring.Once Slone thought he had a glimpse of white.Perhaps it was only moonlight.He slipped on and on, and when beyond the branching paths that led toward the house he breathed freer.The grove appeared deserted.At last he crossed the runway from the spring, smelled the cool, wet moss and watercress, and saw the big cottonwood, looming dark above the other trees.A patch of moonlight brightened a little glade just at the edge of dense shade cast by the cottonwood.Here the bench stood.It was empty!

Slone's rapture vanished.He was suddenly chilled.She was not there! She might have been intercepted.He would not see her.The disappointment, the sudden relaxation, was horrible.Then a white, slender shape flashed from beside the black tree-trunk and flew toward him.It was noiseless, like a specter, and swift as the wind.Was he dreaming? He felt so strange.Then--the white shape reached him and he knew.

Lucy leaped into his arms.

"Lin! Lin! Oh, I'm so--so glad to see you!" she whispered.She seemed breathless, keen, new to him, not in the least afraid nor shy.Slone could only hold her.He could not have spoken, even if she had given him a chance.

"I know everything--what they accuse you of--how the riders treated you--how my dad struck you.Oh!...He's a brute! I hate him for that.Why didn't you keep out of his way?...Van saw it all.Oh, I hate him, too! He said you lay still--where you fell!...Dear Lin, that blow may have hurt you dreadfully--shamed you because you couldn't strike back at my dad--but it reached me, too.It hurt me.It woke my heart....Where--where did he hit you? Oh, I've seen him hit men! His terrible fists!""Lucy, never mind," whispered Slone."I'd stood to be shot just for this."He felt her hands softly on his face, feeling around tenderly till they found the swollen bruise on mouth and chin.

"Ah!...He struck you.And I--I'll kiss you," she whispered."If kisses will make it well--it'll be well!"She seemed strange, wild, passionate in her tenderness.She lifted her face and kissed him softly again and again and again, till the touch that had been exquisitely painful to his bruised lips became rapture.Then she leaned back in his arms, her hands on his shoulders, white-faced, dark-eyed, and laughed up in his face, lovingly, daringly, as if she defied the world to change what she had done.

"Lucy! Lucy!...He can beat me--again!" said Slone, low and hoarsely.

"If you love me you'll keep out of his way," replied the girl.

"If I love you?...My God!...I've felt my heart die a thousand times since that mornin'--when--when you--""Lin, I didn't know," she interrupted, with sweet, grave earnestness."I know now!"And Slone could not but know, too, looking at her; and the sweetness, the eloquence, the noble abandon of her avowal sounded to the depths of him.His dread, his resignation, his shame, all sped forever in the deep, full breath of relief with which he cast off that burden.He tasted the nectar of happiness, the first time in his life.He lifted his head--never, he knew, to lower it again.He would be true to what she had made him.

"Come in the shade," he whispered, and with his arm round her he led her to the great tree-trunk."Is it safe for you here? An' how long can you stay?""I had it out with Dad--left him licked once in his life," she replied."Then I went to my room, fastened the door, and slipped out of my window.I can stay out as long as I want.No one will know."Slone's heart throbbed.She was his.The clasp of her hands on his, the gleam of her eyes, the white, daring flash of her face in the shadow of the moon--these told him she was his.How it had come about was beyond him, but he realized the truth.What a girl! This was the same nerve which she showed when she had run Wildfire out in front of the fleetest horses in the uplands.

"Tell me, then," he began, quietly, with keen gaze roving under the trees and eyes strained tight, "tell me what's come off.""Don't you know?" she queried, in amaze.