Free Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams Page A

not speak, nor did he; but then she said gravely: ‘Thank you, Mr. Harland.’
    So they parted and Harland was alive with a mysterious excitement. He heard her mother’s querulous greeting, heard the sound of a sneeze, as Ellen went into the cabin where they lodged.
    â€“ VII –
    Harland after breakfast waited for Ellen to reappear, and he stayed at the lodge all day, refusing Robie’s suggestion that they try the brooks; but she remained invisible till dinner time. Even then he had no chance to claim her, for when they rose from the table, she joined Tess and Lin at one end of the wide veranda, and they chattered together like children, flying into gales of laughter at their own words or at nothing. Harland, sitting with Glen and Mrs. Robie twenty feet away, wished he might join them, but would not without an invitation. The moon was waxing, and the canyon was paved with magic shadows that were broken by silver light patterns, and presently the two young people and Ellen strolled away down the trail together, and their voices came back softly through the night, blurred by the steady chuckle of the brook. After a time, at some distance, he heard them singing the nonsense songs of which children — young or old — never tire.
He was so abstracted that Robie noticed it and suggested they join the singers; but Harland, feeling that Robie had read his mind, reddened in the darkness; and he said he was sleepy and would go to bed, and did so.
    At breakfast Robie proposed a day of fishing, and Harland agreed and hoped Ellen might go with them; but when Robie invited her to do so, she declined. ‘Lin says he and Charlie Yates and one of the cowboys want to try to locate a trail out of the box canyon up in the horse parks,’ she explained. ‘I’m going with them.’
    So to Harland the fishing was dull and profitless. Back at the lodge they found she had not returned, and they sat on the veranda for a while, and the sun sank lower in the west, till at last Glen said:
    â€˜Look yonder!’
    Ellen and Lin had appeared on the crest of the ridge above camp, and now they brought their horses plunging down the steep descent, refusing the trail, starting a small avalanche of tumbling loose stones, the horses as often as not sliding on their rumps, plunging through the pines and aspens which clad the slope, the riders with shrill cries urging them on. When they reached the level, Lin was one jump ahead; but as they raced toward the lodge, splashing through the brook, his hand lay too heavy on the reins, so that he twitched his horse off stride. Ellen passed him and came first to the goal triumphantly.
    Lin had lost his hat, and from a deep scratch on Ellen’s cheek fresh blood trickled, bright crimson against her warm dark skin. They were panting and laughing, and Lin explained to his father, while he gasped for breath:
    â€˜We raced the last mile, Dad; took a straight line, up and down, over everything. I’d have beat her, too, but I swung too far south on the first pitch. I thought she was headed wrong.’
    Glen laughed. ‘Ellen always knows exactly where she is, and where she’s going,’ he said drily.
    â€˜She’ll never beat me again,’ Lin declared, and Ellen laughed and told him she could beat him whenever he chose. She was in
dungarees, hot and soiled from her long day in the saddle, that scratch on her cheek a red flame, her face as smudged and sweat-stained as the boy’s; but she appeared for dinner in something light and soft and completely feminine, and the contrast beween her delicate and pulsing beauty now and the disordered hoyden she had been an hour before seemed to Harland so intoxicating that he became suddenly wary. When Robie next morning proposed an inspection trip to the upper pastures, he accepted, determined to put her out of his mind.
    He and Robie rode all day, scouring every covert, starting the scattered bunches of cattle and