Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/86

 over their best dresses, and held plates from which they ate decorously.

"Do have some more, Mrs. Billings. We haven't made a dent in that freezer yet."

All over. All gone. Only that cabin down south of the river, with the water to be carried from the well behind the corral, and winter coming on and no wood laid in. It was hardly weather-proof, that cabin. She couldn't take Nellie there. She wouldn't. Nellie was young; she had a right to live, and to live like a lady.

Suddenly she smelled her bread burning. When she threw open the oven door she could hardly see it for tears.

It was a melancholy day. Tom, climbing through the cloud banks, which were cold and saturated with moisture, was filled with anger and savage resentment. Heretofore he had taken what he wanted from life and had been answerable to nobody. Girls had come and gone; he had made his violent brief love to them, had taken them when he could, and then promptly forgotten them. "God's gift to women," they called him at the ranch. He had eaten when he was hungry, drunk whisky when he could get it, and because he asked nothing more of life, except a good top horse to his string, he had been satisfied.

And now had come this girl. She had attracted him first because she was different and unattainable. He had liked her small white hands, the tilt of her head, even the way she rode. But at first he had been wary. She was a Dowling, and what were the Dowlings to him? Perhaps had it not been for Herbert he would have let her alone entirely. But there was Herbert, obviously infatuated and jealous. And so he had played the game like the fool he was, at first for the fun of it and now

Perhaps it was defeat more than anything else which sent him scowling on his way that day. Defeat and resentment that he had let himself be caught, and that now he was suffering like a trapped animal.

He looked back only once. Just before he entered the cloud bank he reined in the Miller and throwing a leg over his neck, turned and looked back. Spread out beneath him