In vain Lizzie fought for her control; her lip trembled
and her voice shook.
“I hate you, Sue!”
“Sue, ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”
pleaded the mother.
“No, I ain’t! Think of it; here’s
Ralph been sweet on Liz for two years an’ now
she gives him the go-by for a skinny, affected dude
like that feller that was here. And he’s
forgot you already, Liz, the minute he stopped laughing
at you for bein’ so easy.”
“Ma, are you goin’ to let Sue talk like
this—right before a stranger?”
“Sue, you shut up!” commanded the father.
“I don’t see nobody that can make me,”
she said, surly as a grown boy. “I can’t
make any more of a fool out of Liz than that tenderfoot
made her!”
“Did he,” asked Steve, “ride a piebald
mustang?”
“D’you know him?” breathed Lizzie,
forgetting the tears of shame which had been gathering
in her eyes.
“Nope. Jest heard a little about him along
the road.”
“What’s his name?”
Then she coloured, even before Sue could say spitefully:
“Didn’t he even have to tell you his name
before he kissed you?”
“He did! His name is—Tony!”
“Tony!”—in deep disgust.
“Well, he’s dark enough to be a dago!
Maybe he’s a foreign count, or something, Liz,
and he’ll take you back to live in some castle
or other.”
But the girl queried, in spite of this badinage:
“Do you know his name?”
“His name,” said Nash, thinking that it
could do no harm to betray as much as this, “is
Anthony Bard, I think.”
“And you don’t know him?”
“All I know is that the feller who used to own
that piebald mustang is pretty mad and cusses every
time he thinks of him.”
“He didn’t steal the hoss?”
This with more bated breath than if the question had
been: “He didn’t kill a man?”
for indeed horse-stealing was the greater crime.
Even Nash would not make such an accusation directly,
and therefore he fell back on an innuendo almost as
deadly.
“I dunno,” he said non-committally, and
shrugged his shoulders.
With all his soul he was concentrating on the picture
of the man who conquered a fighting horse and flirted
successfully with a pretty girl the same day; each
time riding on swiftly from his conquest. The
clues on this trail were surely thick enough, but
they were of such a nature that the pleasant mind
of Steve grew more and more thoughtful.
LEMONADE
In fact, so thoughtful had Nash become, that he slept
with extraordinary lightness that night and was up
at the first hint of day. Sue appeared on the
scene just in time to witness the last act of the usual
drama of bucking on the part of the roan, before it
settled down to the mechanical dog-trot with which
it would wear out the ceaseless miles of the mountain-desert
all day and far into the night, if need be.
