“They certainly are,” he stated. “Sitting on a slab of rock in that infernal moonlight like a couple of feeble-minded turtledoves. Why in thunder couldn’t it ’a’ rained tonight—good and hard? Romola, I don’t want to harry you up any more than’s necessary but you take, say, about two or three more nights like this and they’re liable to do considerable damage to tender hearts.”

“Don’t I know it? Oh-h, Hector!”

“Well, anyhow, I had the right angle on the situation before you tumbled,” he said with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. “I can give myself credit for that much intelligence anyhow.” It was quite plain that he did.

He stepped, a broad shape in his thick pajamas and quilted sleeping-boots, to the door flap and he drew the canvas back and peeped through the opening.

The pair under discussion had found the night air turning chill and their perch hard. They got up and stood side by side in the shimmering white glow. Against a background of luminous blue-black space, it revealed their supple figures in strong, sharp relief. The youth made a handsome shadowgraph. His wide-brimmed sugar-loaf hat; his blue flannel blouse; his Angora chaps with wings that almost were voluminous enough for an eagle’s wings; his red silk neckerchief reefed in by a carved bone ring to fit a throat which Mr. Gatling knew to be sun-tanned and wind-tanned to a healthy mahogany-brown; his beaded, deep-cuffed gauntlets; his sharp-toed, high-heeled, silver-roweled boots of a dude cowboy—they all matched and modeled in with the slender waist and the flat thighs and the sinewy broad shoulders and the alert head of the wearer.

His name was Hayes Tripler, but the other two guides generally called him “Slick” and they looked up to him, for he had ridden No Home, the man-killer, at last year’s Pendleton Round-up and hoped this year to be in the bulldogging money over the line at Calgary.

 Hayes had ridden the man-killer at the Pendleton Round-up. And three moonlight nights hand-running had their effect on Shirley’s impressionable youth.   

Within his limitations he was an exceedingly competent person and given to deporting himself accordingly.

At this present moment he appeared especially well pleased with his own self-cast horoscope. There was a kind of proud proprietary aura all about him.

The watcher inside the tent saw a caressing arm slip from about his 

 Prev. P 7/18 next