“All right, Mr. Inger,” he said. “I guess the Flag-pole can stand that much. But you hadn’t ought to be so devilish lordly in your ways,” he complained.
The Inger pocketed his revolver, and smiled—the slow, indolent, adorable smile which had made all Inch and the men at the mines his friends.
“If you feel that way about it, my friend—” he said, and leaned forward and added something, his hand outstretched.
The man nodded, shook the hand, and went to his ticket rack. The Inger wrote out a message to his father, instructing him to pay to the agent a sum which he named; and to his bank he scribbled and posted a brief note. Then as the train pulled in, he turned back to where Lory waited.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Everything’s all right,” he added jubilantly. “Come on!”
Beside the train she would have taken his hand, but he followed her. “I’m coming in,” he said brusquely, and in the coach sat down beside her in her seat.
Then she turned to him, and in her voice were the tremor and the breathlessness which had been there for an instant when, in the morning, she had tried to say her thanks:
“I wish’t I could thank you,” she said. “I wish’t I could!”
He met her eyes, and he longed inexpressibly for a way of speech which should say the thing that he meant to try to say.
“You know, don’t you,” he asked awkwardly, “that I’d do anything to make up—”
“Don’t,” she begged. “I know. Don’t you think I don’t know.”
“Tell me,” he burst out. “Will you tell me? Am I different—ain’t I different—from the way you thought?”
It was blind enough, but she seemed to understand.
“You’ve treated me whiter to-day than I’ve ever been treated,” she said, very low. “Now good-bye!”
The Inger sat silent, but in his face came light, as if back upon him were that which she had kindled there in the hut, by her trust in him, and as if it were not again to darken. The train began to move, and he sat there and did not heed it.
“Good-bye—oh, good-bye!” she said. “We’re going!”
“Yes,” he said, “we’re going! I donno what you’ll say—I got me a ticket too.”
IT was black dawn when Lory and the Inger reached Chicago. Not the gray dawn that he had sometimes known slipping down the sides of the cañons; not the red dawn that had drawn him to his hut door to face upward to the flaming sky, and had sent him naked and joyous, into the pool of the mountain stream; and not the occasional white dawn, which had left him silent on his shelf of Whiteface, staring at the flare of silver in the east, and afterward letting fall into his skillet bacon and dripping—but without thinking of bacon and dripping at all.