Page:The Trail Rider (1924).pdf/131



Texas stood up, as if he were in church. He closed his eyes and listened, and it seemed that tears were burning behind the lids, and that all the tender recollections of his life were coming back to him. Her voice was so soft, so clear in the rising notes, so appealing in the tender tribute of the heart disinherited of its love. He felt that a lonely man must have written that song, and that only a pure woman could make the rest of the indifferent world understand how deep his sincerity had been, how sweetly pathetic his constancy.

He did not know whether he breathed at all until she came to the end, and Malcolm Duncan clapped his great hands, and praised her in his great voice. But when she returned to him in the shadow of the cottonwood Texas took her hands and held them a moment in the grateful expression for which his heart could find no words.

"I'd travel many a day to hear you sing that song again, Miss McCoy," he said, his act of taking her hands so sincerely a gallant, and at once grateful, expression of his emotions that a girl more prudish than Sallie McCoy could not have taken offense. She was fine enough to feel the unusual beauty of his compliment, and thanked him for it, with no pretense of concealing her pleasure.