CHAPTER IV

THE FORD

“These little cotton-tail rabbits,” he said to her slowly, without turning his eyes from hers to those of whom he spoke, “haven’t any more sense than you’d think to look at them.  Once let them get a notion in their heads....  Look here!” he broke off sharply.  “You don’t think the same way they do, do you?”

“No!” she said hurriedly.

Hurriedly, because for the moment her poise had fled from her and she knew that he must note the high colour in her cheeks.  And the colour had come not in response to his words but in quick answer to his look.  A young giant of a man, he stood staring at her like some artless boy who at a bend in the road had stopped, breathless, to widen his eyes to the smile of a fairy fresh from fairy land.

And her “No,” was the true reply to his question and burst spontaneously from her lips.  Her first swift suspicion when she had seen the bulk of him framed against the bleak night had been quite natural.  But now that she had marked the man’s carriage and had seen his face and looked for one instant deep into his clear eyes, she set her conjecture aside as an absurdity.  It was not so much that her reason had risen to demand why a successful highwayman should return into danger and the likelihood of swift punishment.  It was rather and simply because she felt that this bronzed young stranger, seeming to her woman’s instinct a sort of breezy incarnation of the outdoors, partook of none of the characteristics of the footpad, sneak thief or nocturnal gentleman of the road.  An essential attribute of the boldest and most picturesque of that gentry was the quality of deceit and subterfuge and hypocrisy.  Consecutive logical thought being, after all, a tedious process, she had had no time to progress from step to step of deduction and inference; he had asked his question with a startling abruptness and as abruptly she had given him her answer.  The rest might believe what they chose to believe.  She for her part, held Buck Thornton, whoever he might be, guiltless of the earlier affair of the evening.  And, moreover, she could quite understand the impulse that sent an innocent man to toss a handkerchief into the fire and let them ponder on the act’s significance.  The act may have been foolhardy and certainly had the youthful flavour of bravado; none the less in her eyes the man achieved through it a sort of magnificence.

He stood looking at her very gravely and gravely she returned the look.  And it was borne in upon the girl’s inner consciousness that now and for the first time in her life she had come face to face with a man absolutely without guile or the need thereof.  He was in character as he was in physique, or she read him wrongly.  He thought his thought straight out and made no pretence of hiding it for the simple and sufficient reason that there was in all the universe no slightest need of hiding it.  As she looked