It was Dill who lay and smiled quizzically into the dark and listened
to the wide-awake breathing of the man beside him--breathing which
betrayed deep emotion held rigidly in check so far as outward movement
went. He fell asleep knowing well that the other was lying there
wide-eyed and would probably stay so until day. He had had a hard day
and had done many things, but what he had done last pleased him best.
Now this is a bald, unpolished record of the morning: Billy saw the
dawn come, and rose in the perfect silence he had learned from years
of sleeping in a tent with tired men, and of having to get up at all
hours and take his turn at night-guarding; for tired, sleeping cowboys
do not like to be disturbed unnecessarily, and so they one and all
learn speedily the Golden Rule and how to apply it. That is why Dill,
always a light sleeper, did not hear Billy go out.
Billy did not quite know what he was going to do, but habit bade him
first feed and water his horse. After that--well, he did not know.
Dill might not have things straight, or he might just be trying to
jolly him up a little, or he might be a meddlesome old granny-gossip.
What had looked dear and straight, say at three o'clock in the
morning, was at day-dawn hazy with doubt. So he led Barney down to
the creek behind the hotel, where in that primitive little place they
watered their horses.
The sun was rising redly, and the hurrying ripples were all tipped
with gold, and the sky above a bewildering, tumbled fabric of barbaric
coloring. Would the sun rise like that in New Mexico? Billy wondered,
and watched the coming of his last day here, where he had lived, had
loved, had dreamed dreams and builded castles--and had seen the dreams
change to bitterness, and the castles go toppling to ruins. He would
like to stay with Dill, for he had grown fond of the lank, whimsical
man who was like no one Billy had ever known. He would have stayed
even in the face of the change that had come to the range-land--but he
could not bear to see the familiar line of low hills which marked the
Double-Crank and, farther down, the line-camp, and know that Flora was
gone quite away from him into the North.
He caught himself back from brooding, and gave a pull at the halter
by way of hinting to Barney that he need not drink the creek entirely
dry--when suddenly he quivered and stood so still that he scarcely
breathed.
"Oh, where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy?
Oh, where have you been, charming Billy?"
Some one at the top of the creek-bank was singing it; some one with an
exceedingly small, shaky little voice that was trying to be daring and
mocking and indifferent, and that was none of these things--but only
wistful and a bit pathetic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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