Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/84

82 "Suppose I no can help doing that?" she asked, and the breed's face blackened to sudden anger.

"By, you'll sure have to help it," he said violently.

But Andree gave no answer. Her eyes were taking on the wide-wild-animal fear again. For she was thinking of Tempest who had looked at her as no man had looked at her before. She did not know the look for reverence; but Tempest did. Sitting in his office through the silent hours he knew that he thought of Andree as a man thinks of the woman whom he desires to make his wife. Under the knowledge of this his face was changing. It wore more the serenity of a man who sees home before him than the strenuousness that follows the gleam of a star up the heights.

From a practical point of view there was every reason why Tempest should marry. He was thirty-seven, and love had filtered very sparsely through his years. He believed that his Inspectorship was sure in the near future. He was lonely—and every man needs human love to round and ripen his life.

"Besides," he said, and looked on the inchoate well-smudge that was maps and memoranda only, "I think it is taken out of my hands, somehow."

He got up, treading the room with his light virile step. But the dreamer-light in his eyes was not the same. He had given his love to an intangible thing; to the great West that was and would be. An hour had made it concrete in the shape of a woman; but he did not think how much would be lost or won through it. And he had forgotten the word of a great one of the earth, "No man can serve two masters."

Dick's step passed in the passage, and Tempest opened the door with his mind closed like a steel trap on the present moment of duty.

"Come in here a minute," he said. Then, facing the other in the lamplight, he added, "Don't you think you can get through by fighting a man in the open?"

Dick looked at him curiously.

"Does she mean more to you than another woman?" he said.

Tempest stared. And, suddenly and very vividly, it