"As if I knew!" He took the words out of her mouth. "I do."

"How do you know?"

"I tried it."

"And then?"

"Kicked out!" he replied with a grimace.

Marion laughed in spite of her burning eagerness to hear more.

"Not exactly kicked," Smythe explained. "But I'd rather have been. He was as polite as--he's a gentleman, you see, so he knew how to do it without using his hands or his feet."

"But why?" insisted Marion.

"Why did I try? Curiosity. Simple, elemental, irresponsible curiosity."

She laughed again at his frank confession.

"No, I mean why did he kick you out, as you call it?"

"That's what I want to know. And I will know, too. I tell you, Miss g.a.y.l.o.r.d, I admire the man immensely. His secretiveness only makes me like him the more, probably because I myself am so garrulous. Most persons, though, cannot tolerate a man who minds his own business.

Those who have no reason to hate Haig dislike him because he does not ask them to like him. His affairs are his own. Did you notice that scar?"

"Yes," answered Marion, scarcely above a whisper.

"Well, you can build any sort of romance you like around that. He has had his romance or tragedy or something, you may be sure. But he's no ordinary man, whatever he may be doing in Paradise Park. I have heard that he's surrounded with books and pictures in his cottage. He's got a Chinaman for a valet, and an Indian for his man Friday, and their mouths are as tight as his. What's more, he must be all right in the main things, for his foreman and cowboys stick to him through thick and thin, and say nothing. I tell you, Miss g.a.y.l.o.r.d, I'd like to be a friend of his, if only he gave a--"

"A d.a.m.n, I believe they say," she prompted demurely.

"By Jove!" he said with enthusiasm. "You are a--"

She held up a warning finger.

"We're going to be friends, you know," she said. "And friends understand each other--without words."

"Done!" he agreed, reaching for her hand, and shaking it.

"But this mystery," she said. "Doesn't anybody know--"

"You know as much as all of us. Of course," he added banteringly, "there's no denying a woman, when she starts. He might tell you!"

The speech startled her, and she blushed.

"Now, that's sheer impudence!" she retorted.

But he continued to look at her with a curious expression. How much had he guessed? In her confusion an impulse seized her. She leaned suddenly toward him, with flushed face and sparkling eyes.

"You dare me?" she demanded, her voice quivering.

"I dare you!" he answered gleefully.

"Well then, he shall tell me!"

"Good!" he exclaimed. "And I'll be around to take the kicks if he--"

"Oh, Cousin Seth!" cried Marion, leaping to her feet.

The bedroom door had opened, and Huntington came out, dressed in his familiar corduroy suit, but with his left arm still bandaged to his side, Smythe hastened forward to greet him.

CHAPTER VI

THE STORY OF THE SCAR

She was awakened by the shrill chatter of the magpies in the tall pine near her window. Often she had resented their quarrelsome dialogue at dawn, but now she slipped eagerly out of bed, and hurried to the window. There had been rain in the night, but when she had pulled apart the chintz curtains and opened the wooden shutters the air was sweet and clean in her face, and the thin light showed the world rising joyously to the day.

She dressed hastily in her oldest clothes, stole on tiptoe to the kitchen for a biscuit and a gla.s.s of milk, found fishing tackle on the veranda, and was soon running breathlessly past the corrals toward the banks of the Bright.w.a.ter. And all this was a deliberate deception. She purposed to fish, of course--a little, to justify the clandestine expedition; but what she really sought was solitude.

It was half in jest that she had said to Smythe, "He shall tell me!"

But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been trans.m.u.ted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back.

For she had let the days of Seth's recovery and convalescence slip by without telling Claire of her experience in the Forbidden Pasture and on the road to Paradise. The duel at the post-office, she argued, surely had made it unnecessary to warn Huntington of Haig's anger. And yet, as their guest, as Claire's cousin--But had they been quite fair to her? They had not warned her of the hostility across the Ridge; they had let her go blundering into the Forbidden Pasture; not that it mattered so much, though it might have been worse--

Her thoughts were becoming very much confused. She had permitted a man to treat her most offensively, and she had seen him shoot down another without compunction; and that other was her cousin, in whose house she was a guest. And yet she felt no resentment, no detestation, no censure, no rebuke. Instead, here she was running away to think out a plan whereby she might hear the whole story of the feud, and more, from Haig himself.

The morning advanced in rose and pearl nuances. A hundred tantalizing perfumes filled the air; field-spiders' webs sparkled in the dew like silver gossamer; meadow larks rose at her feet, and wove delicate patterns in the air with threads of melody. Who could think amid such diverting beauty? She lifted her head, and went singing through the meadows, knee-deep in the wet and clinging gra.s.s, and laughing when the parted branches of the willows splashed her face and drenched her.

And then, at the first cast she made into a still, deep pool, where the night loitered under the very eye of day, an imprudent trout took the gray hackle fly, and made off with it. The splash, and the "zip"

of the tightening line through the water; and then the fight, and the capture--Well, if they were going to rise like that--

The sun was high before she became aware that she was very hot and tired and hungry. Her shoes were soaking wet, her skirts and stockings splashed with mud; one shoulder was being sunburned where a twig had caught and ripped her white flannel waist; and Seth's red silk handkerchief around her neck was scarcely a deeper crimson than her face.

"But I can't catch them all in one day!" she exclaimed reluctantly, leaning wearily against a tree.

At that instant, under her very eyes, a trout leaped in the nearby pool.

"Impudence!" she cried. "I'll just get you, and then quit."

But it was one pool too many; for at the second cast her hook caught in the rough bark of a log that projected far out into the stream.

"Oh! Now I've done it!" she groaned.

Several smart tugs at the line, with a whipping of the rod to right and left of the log, convinced her that the hook was too deeply embedded to be released by any such operation. Sinking down on a heap of driftwood on the bank, she gloomily contemplated the consequences of her greed. There were two ways to go about it now,--to break the line and leave the hook to its fate, or to crawl out on the log and rescue it. The first was unsportsmanlike, the second was very likely to be dangerous.

"Um-m-m!" she muttered, with a grimace. "It's not easy."

The log ran out, at a slight inclination upward, from the center of the heap of driftwood, and its free end, where the hackle fly reposed at a distance of fully twenty feet from the bank, was suspended barely two feet above the middle of the pool. She leaned forward, and gazed into its dark depths, which appeared to be scarcely stirred by the current, though five yards away the stream was making a merry racket over the shallows.