Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/109

 startled, alert, a question, or rather an appeal, in her concentrated attention. Another man had appeared for a moment from behind the ingenuous simplicity of this Texas cowboy. He had spoken and stepped back again, leaving the curtain that masked him scarcely agitated to show that he had passed. Tom was looking out of the window, his thin whitish eyebrows drawn, making little wrinkles run across his narrow, combative forehead from the bridge of his nose.

"Trampled trails," she repeated thoughtfully. "But they're broader when they're trampled, Tom, and easier to follow along."

"I mean when a lot of people have got the start over you and gone ahead," he explained. "They trample out the tracks of the thing you're tryin' to overtake and throw your rope on, mixin' it up so you can't tell whether you're on the right road or a blind one that spreads out to open range and nowhere in the end. That's what bothers a man, ma'am—Miss Louise."

"What have you been following, Tom, that you've lost in this crisscrossed road?"

Tom turned from the window, put down the knife that he had been holding, blade pointing upward, in his big freckled hand. He met her inquiring, perplexed eyes with a look of leaping eagerness in his own.

"I started out to make a man of myself, Miss Louise. I wanted to get an education in my head and turn out something better than a cowman down among the postoaks on the Brazos. Circumstances, Miss Louise, jetked the rope out of my hand. The animal I thought