Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/327

 "You can go out and sleep in the barn if you want to. But who'd believe it?"

Not Kay. Kay was gone. She had left him. Never again would he come home to the lamps lighted and Kay God! What had he done to deserve it?

He returned to the Newcomb job the next day. Bend, straighten, pitch. Bend, straighten, pitch. The machine roared and shook, the belt writhed, his foot swelled, his arms and back ached. But the labor was good for him; at least he could sleep.

He was silent and morose with the men. When the threshing was over he took his pay check and limped out, to get into the car without so much as a "So long." He went back to the ranch house, unlocked the door and went in, stared around him and went out again.

After that he entered the house as little as possible.

He settled down, in a way. Winter had come. There was no snow as yet, but it was already very cold. The enmity of the Indians and their refusal to sell him hay, the poor condition of the range and his responsibility to Tulloss, added to his real heartache as to Kay, sent him about in a state of savage loneliness.

He took to carrying a rifle with him, on the pretext to himself of killing coyotes and wolves. But it is as well that he did not meet Little Dog at that time. In his brooding anger his hatred had settled on the Indian; by a sort of twisted reasoning he blamed Kay's defection on his lameness. "If he had been a whole man she would never have gone."

He was liable to violent and explosive angers, too. One day, coming over the top of a rise, he saw a gray wolf running, and found a cow down and dying. He shot at the wolf and wounded it, and in a frenzy passion he finished the job with his bare hands. He was ashamed of it when he had ceased to see red, and he carried a badly mangled finger for a long time.

Later on, however, with every intention of a long winter to come, he buckled down to work. Day by day he picked up his "poor" stuff and brought it slowly in for feeding.