Chapter XXV
Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House
as nearly side by side as the Outlaw's wicked perversity permitted. The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick's restraint of rein and spur and win to a bite of Paula's leg or the Fawn's sleek flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and tried to whirl.
"This is the last year of her," Dick announced. "She's indomitable. I've worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that some time she'll catch me napping, and for fear she'll miss that time she never lets any time go by."
"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. 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," 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?"
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.