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Page 56
Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
welcome. He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
and haggard.
"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said. "I hadn't
noticed that the sun was down. It is good to be what you call free
again, isn't it?"
He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs. Then he came
on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
side to hide the bandage.
"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness. "Especially
when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
was next. And especially, too, when you've had time to think. Did you
ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"
"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
deductions."
"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
grinned down at her. "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
pretty nearly as bad. I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
knees . . . and _ride_! Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
right now?"
"Sure of it. And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
prematurely. You mustn't think of such things."
"There you go. Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit
down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak
as a cat this quick?"
He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his
booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her
to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.
"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse
between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet
the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the
stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house. Doesn't it
appeal to you, too?"
"Yes," she said.
"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that
other night, but just for the fun of it. I'd like to ride like the
devil. . . . You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you? . . . to go
scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring
holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that
one man can make. Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and
making a noise? Let me talk! I'm the one who has been shut up for so
long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth. At
first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog,
seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all. Then came the hours in
which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still. Think?
Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that
might happen, and a whole lot that never will. Now comes the third
stage; I can talk better than I can walk. . . . Do you mind listening
while a man raves?"
"Not in the least." She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that
quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples
of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to
think during his bedroom imprisonment. "Please rave on."
"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be
doing something besides talk, can't I? Now let me tell you about the
King's Palace."
"You begin well."
"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing. That was
decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M. You and I and, if
you like, Florrie and your kid brother. We'll ride out there in the
very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone. We'll
lunch and loaf there all day. For lunch we will have bacon and coffee,
cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms. We will have some
trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about. We will have cheese,
perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert. We'll ride home in the
dusk and the dark."
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