Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/258

 was committing herself to. He turned over a little gold brush with his finger.

"You won't need that sort of thing there."

"Would you like me to sell it?"

"God! No!" he said.

After that a new life had opened before him. He even seemed to limp less noticeably. He laughed and talked with Ed at the desk below; she could hear him through her closed door. He ate prodigiously and slept like a baby. There was even boisterousness in his love-making; he would pick her up and hold her to him, as if for sheer joy in his returning strength. And he was busy. He had found a herd, and he was to "throw in" with the Potter outfit on the Reservation, bearing his share of the cost. At night he would sit and figure laboriously. If it cost forty cents a head per month for grazing, then He would survey his totals. "Looks like a lot of money to me," he would say ruefully. But he had his moments of triumph also; one was when he had registered the old L. D. brand as his own.

"That's something to write home about!" he told her boastfully. "I'll bet old Lucius is turning over in his grave."

She suspected a certain malicious pleasure in that, directed not at her, but at her people. She knew he had never forgiven them, and after his stubborn fashion, that he never would. He wanted nothing from them, but their dogged refusal to so much as acknowledge her marriage was a gesture of contempt toward him, and he knew it.

But aside from that he never mentioned them. He had bought horses, a work team, one or two green broncs that he meant to break himself, and a big gelding which he could mount from the right side. "Not much of a string yet," he said, but he had enormous pride in them, in everything. For the first time in his life he had the sense of property.

If Kay had her own reservations, her panicky moments, he never knew them. She was at least getting him away from the town and from Clare; there would be no one to offer him liquor, or send him letters, and she was too ignorant of the feud between Little Dog and himself to