When they had mounted and he had reined his bay down to the side of her
roan, he sat studying her through half-closed, satisfied eyes though he
already knew her as the Moslem priest knows the Koran. While they rode
in silence he conned the inventory. Slim uprightness like the strength
of a young poplar; eyes that played the whole color-gamut between violet
and slate-gray, as does the Mediterranean under sun and cloud-bank; lips
that in repose hinted at melancholy and that broke into magic with a
smile. Then there was the suggestion of a thought-furrow between the
brows and a chin delicately chiseled, but resolute and fascinatingly
uptilted.
It was a face that triumphed over mere prettiness with hints of
challenging qualities; with individuality, with possibilities of
purpose, with glints of merry humor and unspoken sadness; with
deep-sleeping potentiality for passion; with a hundred charming
whimsicalities.
The eyes were just now fixed on the burning beauty of the sunset and the
thought-furrow was delicately accentuated. She drew a long, deep breath
and, letting the reins drop, stretched out both arms toward the splendor
of the sky-line.
"It is so beautiful--so beautiful!" she cried, with the rapture of a
child, "and it all spells Freedom. I should like to be the freest thing
that has life under heaven. What is the freest thing in the world?"
She turned her face on him with the question, and her eyes widened after
a way they had until they seemed to be searching far out in the fields
of untalked-of things, and seeing there something that clouded them with
disquietude.
"I should like to be a man," she went on, "a man and a hobo." The
furrow vanished and the eyes suddenly went dancing. "That is what I
should like to be--a hobo with a tomato-can and a fire beside the
railroad-track."
The man said nothing, and she looked up to encounter a steady gaze from
eyes somewhat puzzled.
His pupils held a note of pained seriousness, and her voice became
responsively vibrant as she leaned forward with answering gravity in her
own.
"What is it?" she questioned. "You are troubled."
He looked away beyond her to the pine-topped hills, which seemed to be
marching with lances and ragged pennants, against the orange field of
the sky. Then his glance came again to her face.
"They call me the Shadow," he said slowly. "You know whose shadow that
means. These weeks have made us comrades, and I am jealous because you
are the sum of two girls, and I know only one of them. I am jealous of
the other girl at home in Europe. I am jealous that I don't know why
you, who are seemingly subject only to your own fancy, should crave the
freedom of the hobo by the railroad track."
She bent forward to adjust a twisted martingale, and for a moment her
face was averted. In her hidden eyes at that moment, there was deep
suffering, but when she straightened up she was smiling.