"Rhythm?"

"I guess that's the word. So's riding. I like to do the things that have that."

"Well, then, you ought to like dancing."

"Yes'm. Maybe I would if it wasn't for havin' to pull a girl round about with me. It kind of takes my mind off the pleasure."

Sheila laughed. Then, "Did you get my note?" she asked.

"Yes'm." Her laughter had embarra.s.sed him, and he had suddenly a hunted look.

"And are you going to be my friend?"

The sliding of feet on a floor none too smooth, the music, the wailing of a baby accompanied d.i.c.kie's silence. He was very silent and sat very still, his hands hanging between his knees, his head bent. He stared at Sheila's feet. His face, what she could see of it, was, even beyond the help of firelight, pale.

"Why, d.i.c.kie, I believe you're going to say No!"

"Some fellows would say Yes," d.i.c.kie answered. "But I sort of promised not to be your friend. Poppa said I'd kind of disgust you. And I figure that I would--"

Sheila hesitated.

"You mean because you--you--?"

"Yes'm."

"Can't you stop?"

He shook his head and gave her a tormented look.

"Oh, d.i.c.kie! Of course you can! At your age!"

"Seems like it means more to me than anything else."

"d.i.c.kie! d.i.c.kie!"

"Yes'm. It kind of takes the awful edge off things."

"What _do_ you mean? I don't understand."

"Things are so sort of--sharp to me. I mean, I don't know if I can tell you. I feel like I had to put something between me and--and things. Oh, d.a.m.n! I can't make you see--"

"No," said Sheila, distressed.

"It's always that-a-way," d.i.c.kie went on. "I mean, everything's kind of--too much. I used to run miles when I was a kid. And sometimes now when I can get out and walk or ski, the feeling goes. But other times--well, ma'am, whiskey sort of takes the edge off and lets something kind of slack down that gets sort of screwed up. Oh, I don't know ..."

"Did you ever go to a doctor about it?"

d.i.c.kie looked up at her and smiled. It was the sweetest smile--so patient of this misunderstanding of hers. "No, ma'am."

"Then you don't care to be my friend enough to--to try--"

"I wouldn't be a good friend to you," said d.i.c.kie. And he spoke now almost sullenly. "Because I wouldn't want you to have any other friends.

I hate it to see you with any other fellow."

"How absurd!"

"Maybe it is absurd. I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said.

"Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy guardian to you--Sheila."

Again Sheila laughed. But the ringing of her silver coins was not quite true. There was a false note. She shut her eyes involuntarily. She was remembering that instant an hour or two before when Sylvester's look had held hers to his will. The thought of what she had promised crushed down upon her consciousness with the smothering, sudden weight of its reality.

She could not tell d.i.c.kie. She could not--though this she did not admit--bear that he should know.

"Very well," she said, in a hard and weary voice. "Be my guardian. That ought to sober any one. I think I shall need as many guardians as possible. And--here comes your father. I have this dance with him."

d.i.c.kie got hurriedly to his feet. "Oh, gosh!" said he. He was obviously and vividly a victim of panic. Sheila's small and very expressive face showed a little gleam of amused contempt. "My guardian!" she seemed to mock. To shorten the embarra.s.sment of the moment she stepped quickly into the elder Hudson's arm. He took her hand and began to pump it up and down, keeping time to the music and counting audibly. "One, two, three."

To d.i.c.kie he gave neither a word nor look.

Sheila lifted her chin so that she could smile at d.i.c.kie over Pap's shoulder. It was an indulgent and forgiving smile, but, meeting d.i.c.kie's look, it went out.

The boy's face was scarlet, his body rigid, his lips tight. The eyes with which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man. Sheila's contempt had fallen upon him like a flame. In a few dreadful minutes as he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness.

Sheila went on, dancing like a mist in Hudson's arms. She knew that she had done something to d.i.c.kie. But she did not know what it was that she had done....

CHAPTER X

THE BEACON LIGHT

Out of the Wyoming Bad Lands--orange, turquoise-green, and murky blue, of outlandish ridges, of streaked rock, of sudden, twisted canons, a country like a dream of the far side of the moon--rode Cosme Hilliard in a choking cloud of alkali dust. He rode down Crazy Woman's Hill toward the sagebrush flat, where, in a half-circle of cloudless, snow-streaked mountains, lay the town of Millings on its rapid glacier river.

Hilliard's black hair was powdered with dust; his olive face was gray; dust lay thick in the folds of his neck-handkerchief; his pony matched the gray-white road and plodded wearily, coughing and tossing his head in misery from the nose-flies, the horse-flies, the mosquitoes, a swarm of small, tormenting presences. His rider seemed to be charmed into patience, and yet his aquiline face was not the face of a patient man. It was young in a keen, hard fashion; the mouth and eyes were those of a Spanish-American mother, golden eyes and a mouth originally beautiful, soft, and cruel, which had been tightened and straightened by a man's will and experience. It had been used so often for careless, humorous smiling that the cruelty had been almost worked out of it. Almost, not altogether. His mother's blood kept its talons on him. He was Latin and dangerous to look at, for all the big white Anglo-Saxon teeth, the slow, slack, Western American carriage, the guarded and amused expression of the golden eyes. Here was a bundle of racial contradictions, not yet welded, not yet attuned. Perhaps the one consistent, the one solvent, expression was that of alert restlessness. Cosme Hilliard was not happy, was not content, but he was eternally entertained. He was not uplifted by the hopeful illusions proper to his age, but he loved adventure. It was a bitter face, bitter and impatient and unschooled. It seemed to laugh, to expect the worst from life, and not to care greatly if the worst should come. But for such minor matters of dust and thirst and weariness, he had patience. Physically the young man was hard and well-schooled. He rode like a cowboy and carried a cowboy's rope tied to his saddle. And the rope looked as though it had been used.

Millings, that seemed so close below there through the clear, high atmosphere, was far to reach. The sun had slipped down like a thin, bright coin back of an iron rock before the traveler rode into the town.

His pony shied wearily at an automobile and tried to make up his mind to buck, but a light pressure of the spur and a smiling word was enough to change his mind.

"Don't be a fool, Dusty! You know it's not worth the trouble. Remember that fifty miles you've come to-day!"

The occupants of the motor snapped a camera and hummed away. They had no prevision of being stuck halfway up Crazy Woman's Hill with no water within fifteen miles, or they wouldn't have exclaimed so gayly at the beauty and picturesqueness of the tired cowboy.

"He looks like a movie hero, doesn't he?" said a girl.

"No, ma'am," protested the Western driver, who had been a chauffeur only for a fortnight and knew considerably less about the insides of his Ford than he did about the insides of Hilliard's cow-pony. "He ain't no show.

He's the real thing. Seems like you dudes got things kinder twisted.

Things ain't like shows. Shows is sometimes like things."

"The real thing" certainly behaved as the real thing would. He rode straight to the nearest saloon and swung out of his saddle. He licked the dust off his lips, looked wistfully at the swinging door, and turned back to his pony.