Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/227

Rh that Andrew came again to the house of John Merchant and left Sally in the very place among the trees where the pinto had stood before. There was no danger of discovery on his approach, for it was a wild night of wind and rain. The drizzling mists of the last three days had turned into a steady downpour, and rivers of water had been running from his slicker on the way to the ranch house. Now he put the slicker behind the saddle, and from the shelter of the trees surveyed the house.

It was bursting with music and light; every moment or so automobiles, laboring through the mud, hummed up to the house or left it, bringing guests and taking them away; it must be the reception before the wedding. For some reason he had always imagined the house wrapped in black night as it was the time of his first coming, and it baffled him, this music, this noise, this radiance behind every wind. Sometimes the front door was opened and voices stole out to him; sometimes even through the closed door he heard the ghostly tinkling of some girl's laughter.

And that was to Andrew the most melancholy sound in the world.

The rain, trickling even through the foliage of the evergreen, decided him to act at once. It might be that all the noise and light were, after all, an advantage to him, and, running close to the ground, he skulked across the dangerous open stretch and came into the safe shadow of the wall of the house.

Once there, it was easy to go up to the roof by one of the rain pipes, the same low roof from which he had escaped on the time of his last visit. On the roof the rush and drumming of the rain quite covered any sound he made, but he was drenched before he reached the window of Anne's room. Could he be sure that on her