"I think we ought to go straight off and leave him!" she answered, hotly. "It's perfectly horrid of him to so fah fo'get himself as a gentleman as to pay no attention to his promises. He made a positive engagement with us to meet us heah at foah o'clock, and now it's aftah five. I nevah had a boy treat me that way befoah, and I must say I haven't much use for one that will act so."
Presently, after some slight discussion, the girls slowly gathered up the bundles and walked up the street to the corral. Jack hurried on ahead, so that by the time they reached it, the men there had the ponies saddled and were waiting to help them mount and tie on the packages by the many leather thongs which fringed the saddles for that purpose.
It was a quiet ride homeward. A cloud seemed to have settled over their gay spirits. Nobody laughed, nobody spoke much. The story of Alaka was still fresh in each mind, and what Mrs. Lee had said about the curse of the West, and the fate of the men she had known who had become possessed by the same fever.
They remembered how Jo had come in at daylight, red-eyed and sullen, after his night's losses, for the lucky feeling which seized him at the sight of his cut fingers had been a mistaken omen of success. All that he had saved in months of service had vanished before sunrise in the same way that Alaka's turquoises and shells and eyes had gone.
Deeper than the indignation in Lloyd's heart, deeper than her sense of wounded pride that Phil should have been so indifferent about keeping his engagement to meet them, was a sore feeling of disappointment in him. He had seemed so strong and manly that she had thought him above the weakness of yielding to such temptations.
She recalled the expression of his face the night before when he drew back from the firelight into the shadow, and pulled his hat over his eyes, as Mr. Ellestad began the story of Alaka. Evidently he had played Alaka's game before.
Ah, that night before! How the whole moonlighted scene rolled back over her memory, as she rode along now, slightly in advance of Joyce and Jack. Phil had been with her that night before, and, as the sweet strains of the Bedouin love-song floated out on the stillness of the desert, something had stirred in her girlish heart as she looked up at him. A vague wonder if it were possible that in years to come this would prove to be the one the stars had destined for her. And, as if in answer to her unspoken wonder, his voice had joined in, higher and sweeter than all the others, as he smiled down into her eyes. But now--there was a little twinge of pain when she thought that he wasn't a prince at all when measured by the yard-stick of old Hildgardmar and her father, much less the one written in the stars for her. He wasn't strong, and he wasn't honourable if he gambled, and she told herself that she was glad that she knew it. And now that she had found out how much she had been mistaken in him, she didn't care any more for his friendship, and that she never intended to have anything more to do with him.