Page:Son of the wind.djvu/188

RV 174 The same thought had been in Carron's mind the evening before, had been upon his lips when the letters interrupted him. Now he had forgotten about it. In his mind- he was writing a telegram. "I shall be delighted," he said, while his eye measured the leathers.

She did not speak again, and before he looked up he heard her walking out through the old barn in a cloud of little echoes; but when he rode up the drive a few minutes later he saw her just at the edge of the pines, standing on the carpet which still lay spread out on the ground. She looked toward him and waved her hand. The cool sunrise wind fluttered the red ribbon in her hair. Carron remembered her quite too long after he had lost sight of her. The road he followed had memories of a flying figure letting herself be run away with for the joy of wildness. He did not leave that thought quite behind until he had passed through the village of hills and was fairly out in the long dull level valley with Beckwith in sight.

The day was early still when he got in, but his business in this place was trying and various, first to discover Esmeralda Charley, whom he found in a desperate little half-breed hotel. Here he spent the best of an hour, carefully fishing out of the fellow's mind such ideas as he had on certain matters at the