“Then you don’t care to be my friend enough to—­to try—­”

“I wouldn’t be a good friend to you,” said Dickie.  And he spoke now almost sullenly.  “Because I wouldn’t want you to have any other friends.  I hate it to see you with any other fellow.”

“How absurd!”

“Maybe it is absurd.  I guess it seems awful foolish to you.”  He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor.  Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes.  “There’s something I could be real well,” he said.  “Only, I guess Poppa’s got there ahead of me.  I could be a dandy guardian to you—­Sheila.”

Again Sheila laughed.  But the ringing of her silver coins was not quite true.  There was a false note.  She shut her eyes involuntarily.  She was remembering that instant an hour or two before when Sylvester’s look had held hers to his will.  The thought of what she had promised crushed down upon her consciousness with the smothering, sudden weight of its reality.  She could not tell Dickie.  She could not—­though this she did not admit—­bear that he should know.

“Very well,” she said, in a hard and weary voice.  “Be my guardian.  That ought to sober any one.  I think I shall need as many guardians as possible.  And—­here comes your father.  I have this dance with him.”

Dickie got hurriedly to his feet.  “Oh, gosh!” said he.  He was obviously and vividly a victim of panic.  Sheila’s small and very expressive face showed a little gleam of amused contempt.  “My guardian!” she seemed to mock.  To shorten the embarrassment of the moment she stepped quickly into the elder Hudson’s arm.  He took her hand and began to pump it up and down, keeping time to the music and counting audibly.  “One, two, three.”  To Dickie he gave neither a word nor look.

Sheila lifted her chin so that she could smile at Dickie over Pap’s shoulder.  It was an indulgent and forgiving smile, but, meeting Dickie’s look, it went out.

The boy’s face was scarlet, his body rigid, his lips tight.  The eyes with which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man.  Sheila’s contempt had fallen upon him like a flame.  In a few dreadful minutes as he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness.

Sheila went on, dancing like a mist in Hudson’s arms.  She knew that she had done something to Dickie.  But she did not know what it was that she had done....

CHAPTER X

THE BEACON LIGHT

Out of the Wyoming Bad Lands—­orange, turquoise-green, and murky blue, of outlandish ridges, of streaked rock, of sudden, twisted canons, a country like a dream of the far side of the moon—­rode Cosme Hilliard in a choking cloud of alkali dust.  He rode down Crazy Woman’s Hill toward the sagebrush flat, where, in a half-circle of cloudless, snow-streaked mountains, lay the town of Millings on its rapid glacier river.