an enduring wildness, which was less an actual scent than some powerful influence rising from a fresh earth to stir a man's senses.
Bourke Prine was first to break the long riding silence, at once revealing his irritation. "It was a hell of a thing to happen—and you let it happen, Owen. It is none of my business, but I'd like to know why."
Owen Merritt let the silence drag until Prine thought his partner meant to refuse an answer. But then Merritt said, quite slowly, as if the words were hard in coming, "I went to her at the hotel, I asked her if she was sure she had figured it out right. She said she had. So that was all."
"No," answered Bourke Prine. "No, that wasn't all. You put a question to a woman just like you were pointin' a gun at her head. What the hell were you doin'—just stand in there? What sort of an answer you think a woman would make, asked that way? I never saw you back up before. You just quit."
"Woman's heart is one thing," said Owen Merritt. "Her mind is another. I told you this before. Sally had made up her mind. Suppose I argued her out of it? We'd both remember she once figured the other way. We'd remember it a long time."
Bourke grumbled, "I don't get it at all."
"All right," said Owen Merritt, "I'll make it plain, and then we'll say no more."
His words came slower and drier and with no emphasis at all. Bourke felt the big man was pushing his words up through bitterness. "She's an ambitious girl, Bourke. She made up her mind long ago to be somethin' better than her people. Look at them. Love Bidwell's a shiftless Southerner. Poor white trash. Her brother Starr ain't worth a damn. She saw her mother work like a horse to keep the family alive and decent. She saw her mother die—out of shame, mostly, for what the menfolks were. You know the kind of a shack they live in, and the hardscrabble outfit they've got. Sally had that burned into her. It left a mark. She made up her mind she wouldn't let any man pull her down like they had pulled her mother down. She's got a will and a lot of pride. You want to know what's back of all this? Well, here it is. She figured to do everything her dad didn't do. So here's Isham and here's Skull, and now she's got her place—the wife of the Piute's richest man, and part boss of the biggest outfit in the state. That's it."
Bourke kept still, and they rode a mile or better through the black until he had digested it. Then he said, disbelief in his voice, "A woman doesn't do a thing like that. If it was a matter of bein' poor white trash or Isham's wife, maybe yes. But it wasn't. She had another chance to get away from Broken Buttes and hardscrabble, which was you. You ain't rich but you've got a good ranch. And unless I'm a damn poor guesser, she was in love with you. You ain't tellin' all the story, kid."
"No," said Owen Merritt, in the same dust-dry monotone. "No, I ain't. The rest of it's me. Love Bidwell is a drifter and a fellow always squattin' in the sunshine. She's put up with that all her life. It burned too deep. I'm a fellow that likes to ride over the hill, too. I like to squat in the sunshine. Maybe go see where the antelope are runnin'. Maybe follow a trail into the hills just for the fun of it. She wouldn't take the chance on what I might be when I was as old as Love."
Bourke rolled his weight around the saddle. "No woman would trade off a man that way, like an old shirt for a new one. She wouldn't be much of a woman if she did. It's still out of joint, my boy. I'm not so wise, but I can smell old cheese."
"I've told you the straight of it."
But Bourke went on as if he hadn't heard that answer.
"Maybe," he grumbled, "Lee Repp wasn't so wrong."
"What's that?"
"Well, her brother Starr is no good. He's been stealin'. I know that. So maybe Isham used a little pressure on her—"
Owen Merritt hauled in, which also halted Bourke.
"Bourke," said Merritt—so softly, so deceivingly gentle—"I'll hear no more of that."
"All right—all right," said Bourke, full of irritation. "But Isham took your girl, which has made a sucker out of you before the country. It will get you in trouble soon or late. Mighty damned funny he should make it a point to drink with you in that saloon. It don't make sense—but Will Isham is no hand to do foolish things, so it means somethin'. And it is pretty queer Hugh Clagg should be in the same room with a bunch of Skull men."
He quit. The two men held their horses still, listening to the muffled run of a group of riders in the foreground. After the sound faded Bourke said, "Where'd Repp go?"
"Ahead of us somewhere."
"You goin' home?"
"I guess so."
"So-long then." Bourke pulled away. But he halted and called back, not sure of his partner, "Want me to ride on to the ranch with you?"
"No. Good night."
"Sure," murmured Brouke, and struck eastward toward his own ranch at the base of the Bunchgrass Hills.
Owen Merritt traveled on through the solid dark, giving his horse its own head. A falling star made its faint, spectacular scratch across the low heavens; and the wind threw an increasing chill against him. Far, far away the bark of a coyote lifted up—that saddest and loneliest call of the desert. Released now from the necessity of keeping a straight face to the world, Owen Merritt let his innermost feelings carry him downward until even the little light of the stars seemed to die away. This was the way it went with him, with the thought of Sally riding toward Skull burning through him and leaving its fatal scars. There had been a moment in the Palace when, confronted by Isham, he had held himself narrowly aside from an open quarrel, when the effort to keep down the actual impulse to kill had drawn sweat into his palms. Isham, he knew, had seen the shadow of that in his eyes, and this was why Isham had proposed the drink. He could have destroyed the man at the moment and Isham had been smart enough to realize it.
Sweeping over the long miles, all this kicked its violent course through him until there was nothing left, until he was physically tired. There was a growing shadow straight ahead, which would be the Broken Buttes guarding the southern margin of the Piute Desert. His own road turned left at that point and went another four miles eastward to where Stage Coach Pass separated the Broken Buttes from the Bunchgrass Hills. A single light glimmered through a window of Nan Melotte's frame cabin by the side of the isolated Christmas Creek school.
The scene in the upper hallway remained distinct. Sally, so sad with her talk and so full of a woman's gifts, had waited for him to reveal what was in his mind. He could have taken her out of that hall and cheated Isham in the end. He knew he had that power with the girl's heart and would always have it, as she had the same power over him. Yet in that moment when he knew what he could do, he kept remembering how willfully she had set her mind the other way. And so he had let his chance go by. Distantly and dimly he could admire her for the strong will which rode over her heart's desire; he could admire what she had done, and still want her as he wanted no other woman. But in him, too, was a thought that would not change. He could not take half a woman.
One more thought came to him, harder than the others: Coolly and calmly as she had made her bargain, she didn't yet know to what ends she had fully committed herself. Isham was a quiet man and a slight-figured one, but behind his composed features lay a will greater than her will. She didn't know that yet.
He said to himself, half aloud and deliberately trying to break the emptiness he felt, "I guess I better ride over to Fremont Basin and see where the antelope are running."
He had been watching the light of Nan Melotte's cabin ahead, watching it and seeing nothing. Now at once his normal senses revived, and he pulled the pony in. Somewhere before him two or three shapes cut across the beam of light and the beat of fast- traveling horses ran back, and presently a voice, muffled and quick and ridden by fear, said, "Hey-hey!" It was immediately drowned by the quick beat of gunfire.
Two or three guns—all going at once and quitting at once. He heard no more signaling from that voice as he laid his spurs along the pony's flank and ran dead into trouble. The yonder riders streamed across the light, and a horse careened vaguely forward, causing him to veer aside. When it passed by he saw the empty saddle. In the near foreground he heard