Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/38

 "Sure tried to shake the daylights out of me, didn't you?" he said. "Well, we can't play any more today. I've got work to do."

He led the horse out, leaving Kay alone on top of the corral, and although she waited for some time he did not come back.

It was this small drama that Herbert had watched, sitting unheroically in the ranch office and making his neat figures on a pad.

Whatever was to come, there is no question that it was Kay who made the first overtures. They were young, delicate in a way, tentative and half timid. Perhaps she was left too much to her own devices. Henry sat most of the day in the office, smoking to keep up his courage, and Herbert had to sit with him. Katherine rose late; she was already showing symptoms of the malady which was to attack her later on, but with that painful reticence of hers she said nothing about it. And in the afternoons there were callers. Mr. Tulloss, the elderly banker from Ursula, who had helped old Lucius in that long drive from the border, and Jennie his wife, who was supposed to have had money; the kindly rector of the Episcopal church; Senator Kirkenbride, still a cattleman, and out from Washington to look after his fences, political and otherwise. Even old Doctor Dunham, crabbed, skillful and eying: Katherine with a shrewd professional glance.

"Feeling pretty well, are you?"

"The altitude always bothers me a little. That's one reason we have not been out more. Cream or lemon, doctor?"

"I never spoil the appetite the good God gives me with that sort of pap. Hasn't Henry still got some of that liquor old Lucius left?"

The ranchers came, of course. They brought their wives, left them on the verandah and wandered, with or without Henry, about the place. Some of them wore breeches rather better cut than Herbert's, and English boots also. They lived like the gentlemen they were, on vast estates which no longer paid them to hold. Some of them were still solvent, but Tulloss, meeting them there, would shake his great gray