The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“And some time she may catch you,” Paula said.

“That’s why I’m giving her up. It isn’t exactly a strain on me, but soon or late she’s bound to get me if there’s anything in the law of probability[429]. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up.”

“You’re a wonder, Red Cloud,” Paula smiled.

“Why?”

“You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up by.”

“I’ll be darned if I did,” he laughed back. “There was where all signs failed. I didn’t have a statistic that applied to you. I merely acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her —”

“And got her,” Paula completed for him. “But since, Red Cloud, since. Surely you’ve accumulated enough statistics on me.”

“A few, quite a few,” he admitted. “But I hope never to get the last one —”

He broke off at sound of the unmistakable nicker of Mountain Lad. The stallion appeared, the cowboy on his back, and Dick gazed for a moment at the perfect action of the beast’s great swinging trot.

“We’ve got to get out of this[430],” he warned, as Mountain Lad, at sight of them, broke into a gallop.

Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while from behind they heard the soothing “Whoas” of the rider, the thuds of the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The Outlaw answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the commotion they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.

Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.

“He’s never really injured anybody yet,” Paula said, as they started back.

“Except when he casually stepped on Cowley’s toes. You remember he was laid up in bed for a month,” Dick reminded her, straightening out the Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange look with which Paula was regarding him.

There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear – yes, almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but, most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his thinking in statistics.

But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.

“They missed it,” he said. “It should have been repaired a month ago.”

“What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?” Paula inquired.

This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of starving to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in his wilder mountain pastures to the west.

“It’s time to break them,” he answered. “And I’m thinking of a real old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and all the rest, and invite the country-side?”

“And then you won’t be there,” Paula objected.

“I’ll take a day off. Is it a go?[431]”

They reined to one side of the road, as she agreed, to pass three farm tractors, all with their trailage of ganged discs and harrows.

“Moving them across to the Rolling Meadows,” he explained. “They pay over horses on the right ground.”

Rising from the home valley, passing through cultivated fields and wooded knolls, they took a road busy with many wagons hauling road-dressing from the rock-crusher they could hear growling and crunching higher up.

“Needs more exercise than I’ve been giving her,” Dick remarked, jerking the Outlaw’s bared teeth away from dangerous proximity to the Fawn’s flank.

“And it’s disgraceful the way I’ve neglected Duddy and Fuddy,” Paula said. “I’ve kept their feed down[432] like a miser, but they’re a lively handful just the same.”

Dick heard her idly, but within forty-eight hours he was to remember with hurt what she had said.

They continued on till the crunch of the rock-crusher died away, penetrated a belt of woodland, crossed a tiny divide where the afternoon sunshine was wine-colored by the manzanita and rose-colored by madroños, and dipped down through a young planting of eucalyptus to the Little Meadow. But before they reached it, they dismounted and tied their horses. Dick took the .22 automatic rifle from his saddle-holster, and with Paula advanced softly to a clump of redwoods on the edge of the meadow. They disposed themselves in the shade and gazed out across the meadow to the steep slope of hill that came down to it a hundred and fifty yards away.

“There they are – three – four of them,” Paula whispered, as her keen eyes picked the squirrels out amongst the young grain.