Now he was near the place where he would turn off the main road and
gallop straight to her. Glory always made that turn of his own accord,
lately. Weary had told her, last Sunday, how he could never get Glory
past that turn, any more, without a fight, no matter what might be the
day or the hour.
Now he would swing into the school-house trail. Miss Satterly raised
both hands with a very feminine gesture and patted her hair
tentatively, tucking in a stray lock here and there.
Her hands dropped heavily to her lap, just as the blood dropped away
from her cheeks and the happy glow dulled in her eyes. It was not
Weary. It was the Swede who worked for Jim Adams and who rode a sorrel
horse which, at a distance, resembled Glory.
Mechanically she watched him go on down the trail and out of sight;
picked up her guitar which had grown suddenly heavy, crept inside and
closed the door and locked it She looked around the clean, eerily
silent schoolroom, walked with echoing steps to the desk and laid her
head down among the cans of sweet-smelling, prairie flowers and cried
softly, in a tired, heartbreaking fashion that made her throat ache,
and her head.
The shadows had flowed over the coulee-rim and the hilltops were
smothered in gloom when Miss Satterly went home that night, and her
aunt Meeker sent her straight to bed and dosed her with horrible home
remedies.
By morning she had recovered her spirit--her revengeful spirit, which
she kept as the hours wore on and Weary did not come. She would teach
him a lesson, she told herself often. By evening, however, her mood
softened. There were many things that could have kept him away against
his will; he was not his own master, and it was shipping time.
Probably he had been out with the roundup, or something. She decided
that petty revenge is unwomanly besides giving evidence of a narrow
mind and shallow, and if Weary could show a good and sufficient reason
for staying away like that when there were matters to be settled
between them, she would not be petty and mean about it; she would be
divine--and forgive.
PART THREE
Weary was standing pensively by the door, debating with himself the
advisability of going boldly over and claiming the first waltz with the
schoolma'am--and taking a chance on being refused--when Cal Emmett gave
him a vicious poke in the ribs by way of securing his attention.
"Do yuh see that bunch uh red loco over there by the organ?" he wanted
to know. "That's Bert Rogers' cousin from Iowa."
Weary looked and wilted against the wall. "Oh, Mamma!" he gasped.
"Ain't she a peach? There'll be more than one pair uh hands go into
the air to-night. It's a good thing Len got the drop on me first or
I'd be making seven kinds of a fool uh myself, chances is. Bert says
she's bad medicine--a man-killer from away back.
"Say, she's giving us the bad-eye. Don't rubber like that, Weary; it
ain't good manners, and besides; the schoolma'am's getting fighty, if
I'm any judge."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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