“Oh, yes, you have, my dear! Observe me beat on my chest. I, Sandy Griswold, will save this maiden in distress! But it’s always best to get the truth, the first thing. Well, you’ve got it now. You never would have learned it unless I had told you. That young man would rather cut his throat than tell you what I have told you. He never dreamed I would. But I thought it right.”
“You have got to go on in this way, my dear. There is nothing else for you to do. When that man says he is through he is through. He’s got the chief ingredients of a bad man. But there never was a bad man who didn’t have good things about him. That sort of a man can’t alter a decision. He thinks once, acts once, is done once and for all, and when he’s done he’s done. I can’t help you with him. But what a splendid pair of human beings you have spoiled!”
“A fine prospect you give me, sir! Oh, you are comforting!” said Taisie Lockhart bitterly.
“It will be very hard for a girl like you not to marry some man. It is a very terrible thing to marry the wrong man, my dear. It’s a very terrible thing to let a man think you meant to marry him when you didn’t. It’s the worst when a man wants to marry and can’t—because he can’t forgive an insult to his honor. It is lucky you are not a man.”
“Ah, less lucky that I am woman! I shall choke at the thought of eating his bread!”
“Oh, no, you won’t. That’s melodrama, my dear. If you don’t like his flour eat some of mine.
“No, keep your eyes closed and your mouth closed, too, until you get to Abilene. I may meet you or send for you up there myself. That’s what the Army’s for—we’re organized to help damsels in distress. That you are in distress I know very well indeed. While there’s a sack of flour or an ambulance mule left—well, we’ll see.”
At the encampment of the last night below the Washita, Taisie Lockhart might well have felt a sense of security. There were two troops of cavalry and all her own men bivouacked about her. But she could not sleep.
Soon after dark that night Dan McMasters, asking no consent and giving no notification, quietly rose and caught up his night horse. He disappeared in the darkness headed toward the ford. He said no word of good-by to any one, and was not missed by any one—save by one unhappy girl who had lacked his coming all these days. She was sure she hated him—when she reasoned. When she did not reason she felt her veins run hot with love of him. He had kissed her. Their arms had encircled one another. Ah, obligations?