CHAPTER XIX

SIX FEET FOUR!

Winifred Waverly looked steadily into Buck Thornton’s eyes, suddenly determined that she would see in them the guile which must be there.  Surely a man could not do the things which this man so brazenly did, and not show something of it!  And she saw a glance as steady as her own, eyes as clear and filled with a very frank admiration.  In spite of her, her color rose and her eyes wavered a little.  Then she noticed that Mrs. Sturgis’s keen eyes were upon her, and swiftly drove the expression from her own eyes and returned Thornton’s greeting indifferently.  Some day her uncle would accuse this man, but she did not care to give her personal affair over to the tongue of gossip, nor did she care to have her name linked in any way with Buck Thornton’s.

“May I have this dance, Miss Waverly?”

He had put out his arm as though her affirmative were a foregone conclusion.  She stared at him, wondering where were the limits to this man’s audacity.  Then, before she could reply, Mrs. Sturgis had answered for her.  For Mrs. Sturgis was a born match maker, Buck was like a son to her motherly heart, Winifred Waverly was the “sweetest little thing” she had ever seen, and they had in them the making of such a couple as Mrs. Sturgis couldn’t find every day of the week.

“Go ’long with you, Buck Thornton!” she cried, making a monumental failure of the frown with which she tried to draw her placid brows.  “Here I thought all the time you was goin’ to ask me!”

Then she jerked him by the arm, dragging him nearer, playfully pushed the girl toward him, and before she well knew what had happened Winifred found herself in Thornton’s arms, whirling with him to the merry-fiddled music, putting out her little slipper by the side of his big boot to the step of the rye-waltz.  And Mrs. Sturgis, drawing her twinkling eyes away from them and turning upon Ben Broderick, who had arrived just too late, with as much malice in her smile as she knew how to put into it, remarked meaningly,

“A little slow, Mr. Broderick!  You got to keep awake when there’s a man like Buck around.”

And she seemed very much pleased with the look in Broderick’s eyes, a look of blended surprise and irritation.

“Thornton and her uncle are not just exactly friends,” he retorted coolly.

“If they was,” she flung back at him, “I’d think a heap sight more of ol’ Ben Pollard!”

Mrs. Sturgis’s manoeuvre had so completely taken the girl by surprise that as she floated away in the cowboy’s arms she was for a little undecided what to do.  She did not want to dance with Thornton; it had been upon the tip of her tongue to make the old excuse and tell him that she was engaged for this waltz.  In that way the whole episode would have passed unnoticed.  But now, if they stopped, if she had him take her to her seat and leave her, everybody would see, everybody would talk, gossip would remember that when she had first come to Hill’s Corners John Smith had ridden with her as far as the Bar X, and that Smith had told there how Buck Thornton had ridden as far as his place with her; and then gossip would go on into endless speculation as to what had happened upon the trail which now made her refuse to dance with him.