PAGE 15
The Lonesome Trail
by
By morning she had recovered her spirit–her revengeful spirit, which she kept as the hours wore on and Weary did not come. She would teach him a lesson, she told herself often. By evening, however, her mood softened. There were many things that could have kept him away against his will; he was not his own master, and it was shipping time. Probably he had been out with the roundup, or something. She decided that petty revenge is unwomanly besides giving evidence of a narrow mind and shallow, and if Weary could show a good and sufficient reason for staying away like that when there were matters to be settled between them, she would not be petty and mean about it; she would be divine–and forgive.
PART THREE
Weary was standing pensively by the door, debating with himself the advisability of going boldly over and claiming the first waltz with the schoolma’am–and taking a chance on being refused–when Cal Emmett gave him a vicious poke in the ribs by way of securing his attention.
“Do yuh see that bunch uh red loco over there by the organ?” he wanted to know. “That’s Bert Rogers’ cousin from Iowa.”
Weary looked and wilted against the wall. “Oh, Mamma!” he gasped.
“Ain’t she a peach? There’ll be more than one pair uh hands go into the air to-night. It’s a good thing Len got the drop on me first or I’d be making seven kinds of a fool uh myself, chances is. Bert says she’s bad medicine–a man-killer from away back.
“Say, she’s giving us the bad-eye. Don’t rubber like that, Weary; it ain’t good manners, and besides; the schoolma’am’s getting fighty, if I’m any judge.”
Weary pulled himself together and tried to look away, but a pair of long blue eyes with heavy white lids drew him hypnotically across the room. He did not want to go; he did not mean to go, but the first he knew he was standing before her and she was smiling up at him just as she used to do. And an evil spell seemed to fall upon Weary, so that he thought one set of thoughts while his lips uttered sentences quite apart from his wishes. He was telling her, for instance, that he was glad to see her; and he was not glad. He was wishing the train which brought her to Montana had jumped the track and gone over a high cut-bank, somewhere.
She continued to smile up at him, and she called him Will and held out her hand. When, squirming inward protest, he took it, she laid her left hand upon his and somehow made him feel as if he were in a trap. Her left hand was soft and plump and cool, and it was covered with rings that gave flashes and sparkles of light when she moved, and her nails were manicured to a degree not often seen in Dry Lake. She drew her fingers caressingly over his hand and spoke to him in italics, in the way that had made many a man lose his head and say things extremely foolish. Her name was Myrtle Forsyth, as Weary had cause to remember.
“How strange to see you away out here,” she murmured, and glanced to where the musicians were beginning to play little preparatory strains. “Have you forgotten how to waltz, Will? You used to dance so well!”
What could a man do after a hint as broad as that one? Weary held out his arm meekly, while mentally he was gnashing his teeth, and muttered something about her giving him a trial. And she slipped her hand under his elbow with a proprietary air that was not lost upon a certain brown-eyed young woman across the hall.
Weary had said some hard things to Myrtle Forsyth when he talked with her last, away back in Iowa; he had hoped to heaven he never would see her again. Now, she observed that he had not lost his good looks in grieving over her. She decided that he was even better looking; there was an air of strength and a self poise that was very becoming to his broad shoulders and the six feet two inches of his height. She thought, before the waltz was over, that she had made a mistake when she threw him over–a mistake which she ought to rectify at once.