The Duke Of Chimney ButteOgden, George W. (George Washington)
General
The Duke Of Chimney Butte
Ogden, George W. (George Washington)
Badlands (S.D. and Neb.) -- Fiction; Cowboys -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Western stories
Again he felt a pang, like a blow from an ungrateful hand. She was
breathing fast, her dark eyes spiteful, defiant, her face eloquent of
the scorn that her words had only feebly expressed. He turned his head,
as if considering her case and revolving in his mind what punishment to
apply.
She was dressed in riding breeches, with Mexican goatskin chaps, a heavy
gray shirt such as was common to cowboys, a costly white sombrero, its
crown pinched to a peak in the Mexican fashion. With the big
handkerchief on her neck flying as she rode, and the crouching posture
that she had assumed in the saddle every time her pursuer began to close
up on her in the race just ended, Lambert's failure to identify her sex
was not so inexcusable as might appear. And he was thinking that she had
been afraid to have him know she was a girl.
His discovery had left him dumb, his mind confused by a cross-current of
emotions. He was unable to relate her with the present situation,
although she was unmistakably before his eyes, her disguise ineffectual
to change one line of her body as he recalled her leaning over the
railing of the car, her anger unable to efface one feature as pictured
in his memory.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked him defiantly, not a hint
in her bearing of shame for her discovery, or contrition for her crime.
"I guess you'd better go home."
He spoke in gentle reproof, as to a child caught in some trespass
well-nigh unforgivable, but to whose offense he had closed his eyes out
of considerations which only the forgiving understand. He looked her
full in the eyes as he spoke, the disappointment and pain of his
discovery in his face. The color blanched out of her cheeks, she stared
at him a moment in waking astonishment, her eyes just as he remembered
them when they drew him on in his perilous race after the train.
Such a flame rose in him that he felt it must make him transparent, and
lay his deepest sentiments bare before her gaze. So she looked at him a
moment, eye to eye, the anger gone out of her face, the flash of scorn
no longer glinting in the dark well of her eye. But if she recognized
him she did not speak of it. Almost at once she turned away, as from the
face of a stranger, looking back over the way that she had ridden in
such headlong flight.
He believed she was ashamed to have him know she recognized him. It was
not for him to speak of the straining little act that romance had cast
them for at their first meeting. Perhaps under happier circumstances
she would have recalled it, and smiled, and given him her hand.
Embarrassment must attend her here, no matter how well she believed
herself to be justified in her destructive raids against the fence.
"I'll have to go back the way I came," she said.
"There is no other way."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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