Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 123, No. 3 — page 108: what you’re looking at

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890 She followed him, mute, back to the au- tomobile. And as they started off, she caught the quizzical eye of Hal Tyson fol- lowing them. Let Hal feel what he might, she thought, she had found a man, and she was going to know him better before she ‘was done. There was very little talk as they jogged back. He was driving with ludicrous cau- tion, now, giving every bump a wide lee- way, and only breathing 2 little deeply to - clear the last vestige of the gas from his lungs. But not a word about what he had done. | The thought came to her that his past must have been filled with a thousand things like this; and he had accepted them as a part of his work. ° When at last he began to speak, it was of the things they passed; and then, when they caught a vista of the desert over La Blanca, it was of the work on the canals. She heard, and she wondered. She had read of simplicity such as this, but she had never seen it. ; When they came back to the house Mrs. Garth met them at the door with a single, anxious glance at her son to make out that all was well with him; Margaret started up toward her room. “ Wait a minute,” called Garth after her, “we haven’t finished breakfast.” She paused, and stared at him. “ And,” he continued, “ I’ve had enough exercise to give me an appetite.” She followed him back to the dining- room, and there he sat down, still with his sleeves rolled up, his hair blown stiffly awry, coatless, his elbows resting on the edge of the table, and his cuffs flopping unkemptly about them; yet he was perfectly uncon- “scious. Perfectly at ease. She felt, oddly, that the chains had been struck away, and now the lion was free once more, Put him in clothes of formal perfec- tion, and he would be tongue-tied and mis- erable again. And she was glad with all her heart that she was sitting opposite a host who looked like a hired hand on a farm— and a rough farm at that! frankly across at her. ‘‘ Coming back to that hotel proposition,” he began, a little uneasily. gitized » Google He was looking ns ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “ Tf you'll allow me to change my mind,” said Margaret Tyson, “ I’d like very much to stay on here with you—if it won’t put too much extra care on the shoulders of your mother.” “Tf it does,” cried Garth, exultant, “ Til give her a hand myself.” CHAPTER XXVIII. THE PADRE INTERVENES. YSON had not fasted long enough to devitalize his body; his time of storm had been rather like the drying-out process which fits the athlete for the strug- gle. In twenty-four hours he was a new man; in forty-eight he could lift the world. A great joyousness possessed him, a friendliness all-embracing. But though he smiled on the Mexicans, they regarded him warily, for they still feared him not a little. They were used to scorn and contempt from the white men of the Southwest. They were used to treatment such as befits a sub- ject race of inferior mentality. To Tyson, their skins alone were brown; and they re- sponded as children respond to the unex- pected kindness of the stranger, at first with - dark suspicion and aloofness, and then a sudden and wholeheated surrender. If he had been a politician campaigning for their votes, he could not have taken half so true a course to win them. Already the rumor spread. He was indeed a gringo, but he was a gringo with a difference. So the whistle sounded the end of this day, and Tyson swung lightly down the slope toward La Blanca. None of the Mexicans offered to accompany him. They would have been glad to do so, but he never thought of inviting them, and without such an invitation they could not go with a gringo. ‘In truth; there was a little atmos- phere surrounding Tyson which served to keep them at a proper distance. He was humming to himself when he en- tered the town by his accustomed route, and still humming when, by the square, he was stopped by a hail from the side. He found himself looking down into the pale, ugly face of the little padre. The padre was smiling as he looked at Original fro AGO Tae: ONMOVLKE COOn THE OHIO STATE