Good Indian by B. M. Bower (best book club books .TXT) 📕

pocketknife, and, though Evadna waited while she might have spoken a dozen words, he paid not the slightest attention—and that in spite of the distinct shadow of her head and shoulders which lay at his feet.

“Oh—Grant,” she began perfunctorily, “I'm sorry to trouble you—but do you happen to have an empty pocket?”

Good Indian gave a final scrape with his knife, and released the foot, which Keno immediately stamped pettishly into the dust. He closed the knife, after wiping the blade upon his trousers leg, and returned it to his pocket before he so much as glanced toward her.

“I may have. Why?” He picked up the bridle-reins, caught the saddle-horn, and thrust his toe into the stirrup. From under his hat-brim he saw that she was pinching her under lip between her teeth, and the sight raised his spirits considerably.

“Oh, nothing. Aunt Phoebe called me back, and gave me a bottle of cream, is all. I shall have to carry it in my hand, I suppose.” She twitched her shoulders, and started Huckleberry off again. She had called him Grant, instead of the formal Mr. Imsen she had heretofore clung to, and he had not seemed to notice it even.

He mounted with perfectly maddening deliberation, but for all that he overtook her before she had gone farther than a few rods, and he pulled up beside her with a decision which caused Huckleberry to stop also; Huckleberry, it must be confessed, was never known to show any reluctance in that direction when his head was turned away from home. He stood perfectly still while Good Indian reached out a hand.

“I'll carry it—I'm more used to packing bottles,” he announced gravely.

“Oh, but if you must carry it in your hand, I wouldn't dream of—” She was holding fast the bottle, and trying to wear her Christmas-angel look.

Good Indian laid hold of the flask, and they stood there stubbornly eying each other.

“I thought you wanted me to carry it,” he said at last, pulling harder.

“I merely asked if you had an empty pocket.” Evadna clung the tighter.

“Now, what's the use—”

“Just what I was thinking!” Evadna was so impolite as to interrupt him.

Good Indian was not skilled in the management of women, but he knew horses, and to his decision he added an amendment. Instinctively he followed the method taught him by experience, and when he fancied he saw in her eyes a sign of weakening, he followed up the advantage he had gained.

“Let go—because I'm going to have it anyway, now,” he said quietly, and took the flask gently from her hands. Then he smiled at her for yielding, and his smile was a revelation to the girl, and brought the blood surging up to her face. She rode meekly beside him at the pace he himself set—which was not rapid, by any means. He watched her with quick, sidelong glances, and wondered whether he would dare say what he wanted to say—or at least a part of it.

She was gazing with a good deal of perseverance at the trail, down the windings of which the others could be seen now and then galloping through the dust, so that their progress was marked always by a smothering cloud of gray. Then she looked at Grant unexpectedly, met one of his sharp glances, and flushed hotly again.

“How about this business of hating each other, and not speaking except to please Aunt Phoebe?” he demanded, with a suddenness which startled himself. He had been thinking it, but he hadn't intended to say it until the words spoke themselves. “Are we supposed to keep on acting the fool indefinitely?”

“I was not aware that I, at least, was acting the fool,” she retorted, with a washed-out primness.

“Oh, I can't fight the air, and I'm not going to try. What I've got to say, I prefer to say straight from the shoulder. I'm sick of this standing off and giving each other the bad eye over nothing. If we're going to stay on the same ranch, we might as well be friends. What do you say?”

For a time he thought she was not going to say anything. She was staring at the dust-cloud ahead, and chewing absently at the corner of her under lip, and she kept it up so long that Good Indian began to scowl and call himself unseemly names for making any overture whatever. But, just as he turned toward her with lips half opened for a bitter sentence, he saw a dimple appear in the cheek next to him, and held back the words.

“You told me you didn't like me,” she reminded, looking at him briefly, and afterward fumbling her reins. “You can't expect a girl—”

“I suppose you don't remember coming up to me that first night, and calling me names, and telling me how you hated me, and—and winding up by pinching me?” he insinuated with hypocritical reproach, and felt of his arm. “If you could see the mark—” he hinted shamelessly.

Evadna replied by pushing up her sleeve and displaying a scratch at least an inch in length, and still roughened and red. “I suppose you don't remember trying to MURDER me?” she inquired, sweetly triumphant. “If you could shoot as well as Jack, I'd have been killed very likely. And you'd be in jail this minute,” she added, with virtuous solemnity.

“But you're not killed, and I'm not in jail.”

“And I haven't told a living soul about it—not even Aunt Phoebe,” Evadna remarked, still painfully virtuous. “If I had—”

“She'd have wondered, maybe, what you were doing away down there in the middle of the night,” Good Indian finished. “I didn't tell a soul, either, for that matter.”

They left the meadowland and the broad stretch of barren sand and sage, and followed, at a leisurely pace, the winding of the trail through the scarred desolation where the earth had been washed for gold. Evadna stared absently at the network of deep gashes, evidently meditating very seriously. Finally she turned to Grant with an honest impulse of friendliness.

“Well, I'm sure I'm willing to bury the tomahawk—er—that is, I mean—” She blushed hotly at the slip, and stammered incoherently.

“Never mind.” His eyes laughed at her confusion. “I'm not as bad as all that; it doesn't hurt my feelings to have tomahawks mentioned in my presence.”

Her cheeks grew redder, if that were possible, but she made no attempt to finish what she had started to say.

Good Indian rode silent, watching her unobtrusively and wishing he knew how to bring the conversation by the most undeviating path to a certain much-desired conclusion. After all, she was not a wild thing, but a human being, and he hesitated. In dealing with men, he had but one method, which was to go straight to the point regardless of consequences. So he half turned in the saddle and rode with one foot free of the stirrup that he might face her squarely.

“You say you're willing to bury the tomahawk; do you mean it?” His eyes sought hers, and when they met