Jack London Burning Daylight

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they were side by side and going in the same direction with miles
and miles ahead of them.
He noted that her eye was first for the horse and next for him.
"Oh, what a beauty" she had cried at sight of Bob. From the
shining light in her eyes, and the face filled with delight, he
would scarcely have believed that it belonged to a young woman he
had known in the office, the young woman with the controlled,
subdued office face
"I didn't know you rode," was one of her first remarks. "I
imagined you were wedded to get-there-quick machines."
"I've just taken it up lately," was his answer. "Beginning to
get stout; you know, and had to take it off somehow."
She gave a quick sidewise glance that embraced him from head to
heel, including seat and saddle, and said:--
"But you've ridden before."
She certainly had an eye for horses and things connected with
horses was his thought, as he replied:-
"Not for many years. But I used to think I was a regular
rip-snorter when I was a youngster up in Eastern Oregon, sneaking
away from camp to ride with the cattle and break cayuses and
that sort of thing."
Thus, and to his great relief, were they launched on a topic of
mutual interest. He told her about Bob's tricks, and of the
whirl and his scheme to overcome it; and she agreed that horses
had to be handled with a certain rational severity, no matter how
much one loved them. There was her Mab, which she had for eight
years and which she had had break of stall-kicking. The process
had been painful for Mab, but it had cured her.
"You've ridden a lot," Daylight said.
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"I really can't remember the first time I was on a horse," she
told him. "I was born on a ranch, you know, and they couldn't
keep me away from the horses. I must have been born with the
love for them. I had my first pony, all my own, when I was six.
When I was eight I knew what it was to be all day in the saddle
along with Daddy. By the time I was eleven he was taking me on
my first deer hunts. I'd be lost without a horse. I hate
indoors, and without Mab here I suppose I'd have been sick and
dead long ago."
"You like the country?" he queried, at the same moment catching
his first glimpse of a light in her eyes other than gray. "As
Burning Daylight
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149
much as I detest the city," she answered. "But a woman can't
earn a living in the country. So I make the best of it--along
with Mab."
And thereat she told him more of her ranch life in the days
before her father died. And Daylight was hugely pleased with
himself. They were getting acquainted. The conversation had not
lagged in the full half hour they had been together.
"We come pretty close from the same part of the country," he
said. "I was raised in Eastern Oregon, and that's none so far
from Siskiyou."
The next moment he could have bitten out his tongue for her quick
question was:--
"How did you know I came from Siskiyou? I'm sure I never
mentioned it."
"I don't know," he floundered temporarily. "I heard somewhere
that you were from thereabouts."
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Wolf, sliding up at that moment, sleek-footed and like a shadow,
caused her horse to shy and passed the awkwardness off, for they
talked Alaskan dogs until the conversation drifted back to
horses. And horses it was, all up the grade and down the other
side.
When she talked, he listened and followed her, and yet all the
while he was following his own thoughts and impressions as well.
It was a nervy thing for her to do, this riding astride, and he
didn't know, after all, whether he liked it or not. His ideas of
women were prone to be old-fashioned; they were the ones he had
imbibed in the early-day, frontier life of his youth, when no
woman was seen on anything but a side-saddle. He had grown up to
the tacit fiction that women on horseback were not bipeds. It
came to him with a shock, this sight of her so manlike in her
saddle. But he had to confess that the sight looked good to him
just
Two other immediate things about her struck him. First, there
were the golden spots in her eyes. Queer that he had never
noticed them before. Perhaps the light in the office had not
been right, and perhaps they came and went. No; they were glows
of color--a sort of diffused, golden light. Nor was it golden,
either, but it was nearer that than any color he knew. It
certainly was not any shade of yellow. A lover's thoughts are
ever colored, and it is to be doubted if any one else in the
world would have called Dede's eyes golden. But Daylight's mood
verged on the tender and melting, and he preferred to think of
them as golden, and therefore they were golden.
And then she was so natural. He had been prepared to find her a
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150
most difficult young woman to get acquainted with. Yet here it
was proving so simple. There was nothing highfalutin about her
company manners--it was by this homely phrase that he
differentiated this Dede on horseback from the Dede with the
office manners whom he had always known. And yet, while he was
delighted with the smoothness with which everything was going,
and with the fact that they had found plenty to talk about, he
was aware of an irk under it all. After all, this talk was empty
and idle. He was a man of action, and he wanted her, Dede Mason, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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