Page:Caroline Lockhart--The full of the Moon.djvu/188

 with which he adapted himself to the people and surroundings so utterly foreign to his own was a constant surprise to her. She was still laughing as Bob rode away, but there was approval in her dancing eyes.

He sighed and his face set in lines of grimness as he lifted his horse to a gallop. He was her comrade, a good chum, that was all.

The suggestion that he should ride the range that afternoon with Ben Evans was his own. Ben merely had acquiesced with as much cordiality as he could summon.

Unaccustomed as he was to concealing his moods and his feelings, the best he could give Bob was a grudging civility. He realized with sullen and awkward resentment that this agreeable stranger, always so courteous and at his ease, was cast in a different mold from himself.

He used words which Ben had never heard; he was familiar with subjects that were vague as dreams in the cowboy's mind, and they, Nan and this stranger, had so much in common while he was an outsider.

He was irritable from a smoldering jealousy when he saw them together, but never