Part 29

They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where superstition begins.

“An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I should be so punished?”

“You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined. “It is more likely some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done. You were a mere accident. I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or anybody.”

As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten it.

“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.

“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”

“No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”

But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.

“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.

It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down, broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed to keep the sun away.

“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew, but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you, nor know how it went with you.”

“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.

She turned her face up to his and met his lips.

“Good night,” she said.

“Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away among the shadows.

* * *

“Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.

Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.

“We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.

“Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no time.”

She shook her head.

“Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.

“Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.

“I don’t know,” came the voice. “I think Robert took him along somewhere—horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what. There’s really nobody left but Chris and you. Besides, it will give you an appetite for dinner. You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day. And Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”

“All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the hammock.

A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses. They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun, and turned toward Glen Ellen. The little town slept in the sun, and the somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.

An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into camp.

“Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said, as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. “Look at her.”