Blount's smile was scornful. "I imagine it was no part of my father's plans that I should keep my appointment," he commented bitterly. "He took it for granted that I would drive out to Wartrace with you, and made his preparations accordingly. This tree wasn't here half an hour ago, and it is here now."
"I can't believe it of him," she denied, and her lip quivered. And then she added: "Just think, Evan; we might have been killed--both of us!"
Blount's teeth came together with a little clicking noise. "Politics, or what passes for politics in this God-forsaken region, seems to make no account of such a small thing as a human life or two," he said. And then: "I suppose we are due to wait until somebody comes along to pick us up. It's four miles or more back to the nearest ranch on the mesa."
"It is all my fault!" lamented the young woman. "I--I might have stopped the car, don't you think?"
"I wondered a little that you didn't at least try to stop it," he permitted himself to say; and at this she forgot the traditions, sociological or other, reverting to the type of the eternal feminine.
"Say it all," she flashed out. "You are beginning to wonder if I didn't do it purposely. I _did_ do it purposely. All the way along I had been trying to muster up courage enough to smash the car in the ditch, and if I hadn't been such a coward I would have done it. Now hate me, if you want to!"
Blount would have been less the lover than he was if he had not been moved to something much warmer than hatred.
"Let us say that you are doing your level best to save my faith in human nature, Patricia, girl," he said soberly. "Do you know what you are? You are the one loyal person in a tricky world. I am still fair enough to say that it was fine--splendid! And I only wish my father were worthier of such superb loyalty and affection."
She looked at him curiously for a moment. Then her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye, and she laughed and said: "Yes, I think women are more loyal than men; and I am sure they are vastly more discerning at times. Don't you think--"
The interruption was the appearance of two horsemen pushing their animals out of a small gorge on the right. When they had gained the main road they came up, ambling easily, and Blount instantly recognized the leader of the pair. It was Barto again.