Over the Border: A Novel

But she got no further. Realizing with sympathetic intuition that the moment was unpropitious, he stopped her. “There is no hurry. I did not intend to tell thee for a little while. But there is no harm done. Thou hast always known it.”

“Oh yes.” Tears dimming the blue eyes, she nodded. “Yes, but – ” Then realizing that argument would but reopen the case, she accepted the compromise. “No, I won’t answer now. Wait.”

“If there be any one else – ” His brow drew down over somber, threatening eyes.

“Oh, there isn’t!” She was conscious, herself, of over-emphasis. But she repeated again. “There isn’t, Ramon!”

“Bueno!” His face cleared. “Then I am content.”

Now she was conscious of vast relief as though at the passing of imminent danger. Relief from what? She refused to think.

Content with her reassurance, he laughed and chatted again as they moved on, but it was a miserable girl that rode beside him; one torn between remorse and a dread curiosity concerning feelings which she obstinately refused to examine. When, finally, they rode down into the cañon, curiosity and remorse both gave place to indefinite apprehension. Without trying, she learned more of herself while they followed the zigzag staircases down and down than she dared to contemplate.

Their first view of the fonda showed, of course, only the roof and walls. But from the lower levels they sighted, first, Gordon’s horse tied to a post of the ramada, then the young man himself leaning at ease across the bar. Ramon, who was riding ahead, obtained first view of the “long-haired diccionario,” which was now being consulted in the matter of hair and eyes.

“The señor seems to be enjoying himself.”

His laugh came floating back. Passing around the next turn, he did not see Lee rein in her beast. Sitting her horse, still as a marble statue, she watched from across the stream the girl’s head go up and meet Gordon’s in a kiss.

For a disinterested spectator the scene would have had vast interest. The chrome-yellow walls of the fonda, toned under the eaves by Time’s green brush; the great shading trees through which the sun sent down a greenish lace of light; the stream singing musically among its glazed brown boulders; all formed a proper setting for the forest love which knows no other sanction than that of the eye. The beauty and abandon of it all would have thrilled the aforesaid disinterested spectator; have carried a theater by storm. But Lee was neither disinterested nor an audience – in the accepted sense. She saw only the abandon. Conscious of a deathly chill at her heart, white as the aforesaid statue, she just sat her beast.

In taking the last turn, Ramon’s horse dislodged a pebble, and as it rolled down the bank and splashed in the stream Gordon broke the girl’s clasp. Ramon was still out of sight, and Gordon’s glance of startled inquiry rose to Lee sitting above, so still and quiet.

“My God, she saw it!”

Even as it flashed upon him he was convicted of a vast and sudden change wrought in himself by the last twenty-four hours. Only yesterday he had assured Lee, with sincerity, that he lost interest in grown-up girls. Now, just because she had caught him in a little gallantry, the whole world had gone to smithereens!

“Competition is the life of love!” Mrs. Mills might have added – sometimes its death. The “wind” had blown with a vengeance – from opposite ways. Sitting above, Lee shook under its chill. Below, Gordon shivered. Though only a few seconds passed before she rode on down and joined Ramon in front of the fonda, it seemed to both a deathless age.

After passing a pleasant word with Gordon, Ramon had called for a drink, and till Felicia brought her a glass Lee sat quietly talking. But as the girl looked up, revealing the soft glow in her great dusky eyes, Lee stiffened and looked at Gordon.

“I am glad that we overtook you. Señor Icarza has asked me to marry him. You shall be first to congratulate us.”

Gordon’s glance had risen to hers in wonder and consternation. Then – the tricks fancy plays us! Fonda and ravine faded into a glade in a Java forest where the light broke down through giant fronds and twined a golden aureole around her fair hair. From that great distance, without recognizing it for his own, he heard a voice.

“I wish you all happiness!”

The crash of Lee’s glass as she threw it among the stones brought him back to the sight of her riding at full speed down the cañon.

Ramon was looking after her, transfixed with wonder.

Gordon’s practical Anglo-Saxon instinct was first to assert itself. He spoke very quietly. “We’d better catch her before she breaks her neck.”

XX: SLIVER IS DULY CHASTENED

Had Lee been really trying to break her neck, she could not have ridden more recklessly.

Where the mule path crossed and recrossed the stream, she took it in successive leaps. Once from the crest of an abrupt declivity her beast launched out like a flying bird, yet picked up its stride and flew on full forty-five feet beyond. Unconsciously, she bent to avoid the oaks that reached down gnarled hands to snatch her from the saddle. Possessed by but one impulse, to escape, she raced down the cañon and out upon the plain.

Had she given full rein to her feeling she would have galloped on and on and on over the receding horizon into a strange world that knew naught of her affairs. But as the violence of the exercise drew the blood from her brain, responsibility resumed its sway. Of her own accord she slackened speed and allowed Ramon, whose fast beast had outrun Gordon’s, to catch up.

Taught, by long experience, to expect from her always the unexpected, he had set the wild flight down as one of her customary pranks. “Little Wicked One!” he called, coming up. “Have a care for my happiness if not for your neck!” But when, in place of the shy confusion of a newly engaged girl, she turned on him a face of cold distress, the glow faded from his own. “Why, queridita? What – ”

“I want you to leave me now.” She cut him abruptly off.

His big eyes widened. “After raising me to heaven would you plunge me in – ”

“Ah no, no!” She impulsively thrust out her hand. “You have earned far more happiness than I shall ever be able to give. But – ”

“Si? But – ”

She gave him a little wan smile. “When you come to understand girls better, you will never demand a reason. Men always know why they do a thing, but girls act from feeling; most of the time without knowing the cause.”

“But – ”

“Ramon,” she looked at him with sweet severity, “if I had told you on top of the mountain what I said back there – wouldn’t you have been content?”

“Assuredly! It was only – ”

“Yes, yes! Now listen. I want you to go, now – and stay till I either send or come. It won’t be long – I promise.”

“Bueno,” he shrugged. “Though minutes will be ages!”

Her hand was still in his. After raising it to his lips, he swung his beast, with a wave of the hand at Gordon in the distance, galloped off to the north.

His departure left her free to review the situation – with little satisfaction. From every angle one fact stood out – in a moment of pique she had engaged herself to a man who, no matter what might have been, she now knew she could never love. Of course it was possible to break it. But even in her desperation she never thought of that.

“You flirted with him,” she berated herself. “Led him on to an avowal; accepted him out of spite. You are a mean, despicable, miserablething, and now you’ll go through with it.”

It never occurred to her that, being so “mean and despicable” it might be against Ramon’s interest to inflict herself upon him. Having, with her girl’s illogic, made up her mind, she felt that peculiar sense of comfort which men obtain from duty done and women from self-sacrifice. She turned and looked back to see how that other criminal – the chief, if unconscious, cause of it all – was getting along; and though he was too far away for her to read his face, his bent head revealed a comforting dejection.

As a matter of fact, he was just as miserable as – as she could have wished him to be. At first his thoughts and feelings had run in a personal groove. At one fell swoop certain excursions into Java forests and to the Chinese Wall, not to mention other desirable and lovely places, had been swept into the discard of broken dreams. Never would tropical sunbeams break down through giant fronds to twine that golden aureole about a certain head! In consideration of his recent awakening to her values as a traveling companion, he was just as sore and silly and jealous as any young man could possibly be. And just as her reflections had, in womanly fashion, turned to self-sacrifice, so his rose, in masculine style, to high, moral grounds.

“It’s a damn shame!” he told himself. “Ramon seems a good sort, but – no greaser is good enough for her!” While the bright, hard specks floated up in his eye, he added, “And it isn’t going to be.”

For a while he entertained a notion to catch up and cleanse himself by open confession. But realizing that two glasses of anisette plus a vagrant inclination – even if the latter were based on a sense of injury – might not appeal to her woman’s logic, he kept his distance. Metaphorically, a quarter-mile of misery stretched between them, across which the dejected droop of her shoulders, his hanging head, wirelessed their hopelessness.

“Poor girl!” he pitied her.

“He’s feeling terribly,” she told herself, with mournful satisfaction.

Nevertheless, when he came up after she drew rein a half-mile outside of Los Arboles, her face was composed in the sweet gravity becoming to her heroic mood. “Our friends” – she nodded toward the distant buildings – “are quite prejudiced. For the present, I wish you would keep it to yourself.”

He bowed with equal gravity, and they rode on in silence.

At the sight of Bull, waiting for them at the patio gate, Lee did cheer up a little – partly because of a natural instinct to hide her hurt, more largely from the sense of protection his presence always gave. Sensitive in all that concerned her, however, he had caught both the droop of her shoulders and Gordon’s air of gloom.

He was not to be deceived. “Been fighting. Wonder what it’s all about.”