First I noticed that her hair, though dark brown, gave out gleams of bright dark fire as the sun shone through it in certain ways.  I kept glancing at that shifting gleam whenever we turned the slow team so that her hair caught the sun.  I have seen the same flame in the mane of a black horse bred from a sorrel dam or sire.  As a stock breeder I have learned that in such cases there is in the heredity the genetic unit of red hair overlaid with black pigment.  It is the same in people.  Virginia’s father had red hair, and her sister Ann Gowdy had hair which was a dark auburn.  I was fascinated by that smoldering fire in the girl’s hair; and in looking at it I finally grew bolder, as I saw that she did not seem to suspect my scrutiny, and I saw that her brows and lashes were black, and her eyes very, very blue—­not the buttermilk blue of the Dutchman’s eyes, like mine, with brows and lashes lighter than the sallow Dutch skin, but deep larkspur blue, with a dark edging to the pupil—­eyes that sometimes, in a dim light, or when the pupils are dilated, seem black to a person who does not look closely.  Her skin, too, showed her ruddy breed—­for though it was tanned by her long journey in the sun and wind, there glowed in it, even through her paleness, a tinge of red blood—­and her nose was freckled.  Glimpses of her neck and bosom revealed a skin of the thinnest, whitest texture—­quite milk-white, with pink showing through on account of the heat.  She had little strong brown hands, and the foot which she put on the dashboard was a very trim and graceful foot like that of a thoroughbred mare, built for flight rather than work, and it swelled beautifully in its grass-stained white stocking above her slender ankle to the modest skirt.

A great hatred for Buck Gowdy surged through me as I felt her beside me in the seat and studied one after the other her powerful attractions—­the hatred, not for the man who misuses the defenseless girl left in his power by cruel fate; but the lust for conquest over the man who had this girl in his hands and who, as she feared, was searching for her.  I mention these things because, while they do not excuse some things that happened, they do show that, as a boy who had lived the uncontrolled and, by association, the evil life which I had lived, I was put in a very hard place.

2

After a while Virginia looked back, and clutched my arm convulsively.

“There’s a carriage overtaking us!” she whispered.  “Don’t stop!  Help me to climb back and cover myself up!”

She was quite out of sight when the carriage turned out to pass, drove on ahead, and then halted partly across the road so as to show that the occupants wanted word with me.  I brought my wagon to a stop beside them.

“We are looking,” said the man in the carriage, “for a young girl traveling alone on foot over the prairie.”