Chapter 27

As by the girls' cabins, so before the Graham house, Lee perceived a motor car. He brought his own machine to a stop near it and cut off his engine. At the same instant the door opened in the house, where by the light shining through the portal he saw Louise's and Charlie Menocal's figures. Menocal stepped forth.

"You will please go now," Louise was saying. "When you telephoned I told you then that I shouldn't go with you, or go to the dance at all."

Bryant had alighted and was arranging the blankets about Imogene. Charlie's voice spoke, rather truculently:

"I told you I was coming for you, didn't I? Now see what a position that leaves me in! People think you're coming. I promised to bring you."

"Then you were too presumptuous," Louise said. "Now go. You're only making a bad matter worse."

"See here, Louise----"

"You had my refusal and I've repeated it a dozen times," she interrupted, indignantly. "Must I shut the door in your face to silence you? And here's another car. Have some regard for my personal feelings, sir."

Lee by now had lifted Imogene into his arms and started toward the speakers.

"Be a good sport, Louise," Menocal pursued, in a tone intended to be wheedling. "Run upstairs and put on a party dress while I wait for you. You don't understand how much I want you to come along to this dance." His words were a little thick and stumbling.

"Hush! Don't you see someone has come? You've been drinking; and you're sickening to me."

"I don't care if someone is there! Let 'em hear, Louise. Let all the world hear, let your father hear, let anybody hear! Because I love you, and so you must come to the dance." Suddenly his tone changed to an angry hiss. "You've been treating me like a cur, refusing to see me or go with me, and not letting me come here. I came to-night! I've stood for enough from you; you can't play me for a fool any longer. And you're going to marry me, too."

Bryant perceived by the lamplight of the doorway that the fellow had snatched her hand, that the two were struggling. Burdened with Imogene as he was, Lee was helpless to enterfere. But he went hastily up the steps toward them. Louise tugged herself free.

"Oh, you contemptible creature!" she cried, in a voice of quivering passion. "It's only because you know father is out caring for stock that you dare stay here to insult me." Then looking past Menocal, she exclaimed, "Who is that?"

"I, Bryant," said Lee. "With Imogene. She's ill, she needs to be put to bed. There was no time to ask your permission to bring her, but I knew----"

"Of course! If this beast will stop making a scene and go!"

Charlie Menocal was pulling on his fur cap.

"So here's our swell-headed crook of an engineer butting in again," he sneered. "You better be hunting up your own chicken, or Gretzinger will have her. Who y' say you got there?"

"Stand aside!"

Bryant's voice struck the other like the lash of a whip, and the half-drunken youth instinctively fell back a pace, so that Lee could pass with his charge into the house. But as Louise was about to follow Menocal seized her arm.

"Girlie, you're not going to throw me down? You'll be good to me and come----"

Louise shook off his hand, darted through the doorway, and quickly closing the door turned the key in the lock. Then still grasping the door-knob she leaned with her head against the panels, face white, lips trembling, and her breast rising and falling stormily.

"Oh, Lee! For you to be forced to see and hear that!" she said, in a tone of anguish.

"I think nothing of it; you could not avoid him."

After a moment she recovered herself and said, "Wait until I call Rosita."

When she returned with the Mexican girl, she conducted Bryant to an upper chamber where he placed Imogene upon a bed, pressed the latter's hand assuringly, and then left her in charge of the other two while he went below to telephone to her uncle. McDonnell had already set out for Sarita Creek, his wife informed Lee. He had started about half an hour before. Bryant went out of the house and entering his car drove down the lane to the main road, where he stopped.

Soon far away in the south there was a flash of light, repeated at intervals, until at length it grew into a steady, powerful glare that threw his own machine into strong relief, that dazzled and blinded him. Finally the other car stopped near by.

"What's the trouble, Jack?" McDonnell's voice came, addressed to his chauffeur.

Bryant went forward to the banker, who was leaning out of the limousine. He gave the information that neither of the girls was at Sarita Creek and explained that Imogene was at the Graham house, comfortable though ill.

"She's too sick to be removed and will probably need a nurse for a time," he concluded. "I brought her here as soon as I learned her condition. Miss Graham put her to bed."

"All right; I'll run in and see her. Much obliged to you, Bryant," was the answer. Then in a vexed strain he went on, "What I expected to happen has happened. Advice, pleadings, commands haven't prevented her from following out this crazy affair. You may not believe it, but she's as stubborn as a mule when she wants to be. My wife has been almost distracted all winter. Well, I'll send up a doctor and a nurse both as soon as I return to Kennard, if there's time before this storm. Still at work?"

"Still digging. Will keep at it till the last minute."

"Supposed you would. That's the lane there, isn't it?"

Next minute the big car had passed Lee's and was moving up the roadway between the rows of cottonwoods toward the house. But Bryant did not at once start for camp. His mind was busy with pictures--pictures of the two girls as he first had seen them at Perro Creek, and at their cabins afterward, and finally to-night: Imogene, weak and racked by a cough and huddling in a quilt beside her sheet-iron stove, and Ruth in her own cabin, standing in the lamplight in her pink party dress with round arms and throat showing through its filmy gauze, unconcerned and intent upon her own ends.

At last he glanced up at the impenetrable sky. Something soft and wet had floated against his cheek. Then he saw here and there in the funnel of light projected by his car lamps what looked like solitary bits of white down sinking through the radiance. Snow!