Miss Satterly sat very still, scarce thinking consciously.  She stared at Weary and tried to imagine him a fugitive from his native town, and in spite of herself wondered what it was he had done.  It must be something very bad, and she shrank from the thought.  Then Cal Emmett came up to ask her for a dance, and she went with him thankfully and tried to forget the things she had heard.

Weary, after dancing with every woman but the one he wanted, and finding himself beside Myrtle Forsyth with a frequency that puzzled him, felt an unutterable disgust for the whole thing.  After a waltz quadrille, during which he seemed to get her out of his arms only to find her swinging into them again, and smiling up at him in a way he knew of old, he made desperately for the door; snatched up the first gray hat he came to—­which happened to belong to Chip—­and went out into the dewy darkness.

It was half an hour before he could draw the hostler of the Dry Lake stable away from a crap game, and it was another half hour before he succeeded in overcoming Glory’s disinclination for a gallop over the prairie alone.

But it was two hours before Miss Forsythe gave over watching furtively the door, and it was daylight before Chip Emmett found a gray hat under the water bench—­a hat which he finally recognized as Weary’s and so appropriated to his own use.

PART FOUR

Weary clattered up to the school-house door to find it erupting divers specimens of young America—­by adoption, some of them.  He greeted each one cheerfully by name and waited upon his horse in the shade.

Close behind the last sun-bonnet came Miss Satterly, key in hand.  Evidently she had no intention of lingering, that night; Weary smiled down upon her tentatively and made a hasty guess as to her state of mind—­a very important factor in view of what he had come to say.

“It’s awful hot, Schoolma’am; if I were you I’d wait a while—­till the sun lets up a little.”

To his unbounded surprise, Miss Satterly calmly sat down upon the doorstep.  Weary promptly slid out of the saddle and sat down beside her, thankful that the step was not a wide one.  “You’ve been unmercifully hard to locate since the dance,” he complained.  “I like to lost my job, chasing over this way, when I was supposed to be headed another direction.  I came by here last night at five minutes after four, and you weren’t in sight anywhere; was yesterday a holiday?”

“You probably didn’t look in the window,” said the schoolma’am.  “I was writing letters here till after five.”

“With the door shut and locked?”

“The wind blew so,” explained Miss Satterly, lamely.  “And that lock—­”

“First I knew of the wind blowing yesterday.  It was as hot as the hubs uh he—­as blue blazes when I came by.  There weren’t any windows up, even—­I hope you was real comfortable.”