Diane of the Green Van

Now presently as he eyed the road ahead for a glimpse of the van, Ronador saw the familiar lines of a music-machine and drove by it with a glance of interest. Instantly the blood rushed violently to his face. For, as the horse and music-machine had been familiar, so was the driver, who swept a broad sombrero from his head and revealed the face of Philip Poynter.

With a curse Ronador abruptly brought the car to a standstill. The very irony of this masquerade fired him with terrible anger.

"You!" he choked. "You!"

Philip nodded.

"I guess you're right," he said.

The blazing dark eyes and the calm, unruffled blue ones met in a glance of implacable antagonism. Not in the least impressed Philip replaced his sombrero and spoke to his horse. Fish crows flew overhead with croaks of harsh derision.

Another buzzard! With a terrible jerk, Ronador drove on, his face scarlet.

So Poynter still dared to follow! By a trick he had bought the music-machine, by a trick he had given the Regent's Hymn to the curious ears at Sherrill's. Very well, there were tricks and tricks! And if one man may trick, so, surely, may another.

Passion had always hushed the voice of the imperial conscience, though indeed it awoke and cried in a terrible voice when passion was dead. So now with stiff white lips fixed in unalterable resolution, Ronador drove viciously on, turning over and over in his fevered brain the ways and days of Philip Poynter. . . . So at last he came to the camp he sought.

It was pitched upon the upland bank of the winding creek and as the car shot rapidly toward it, a great blue heron flapped indignantly and soared away to the marsh beyond the trees. Ronador jumped queerly and colored with a sense of guilt.

There was yellow oxalis here carpeting the ground among the low, dark cedars, yellow butterflies flitted about among the trees where Johnny was washing the van, and the inevitable buzzard floated with upturned wings above the camp. Ronador had grown to hate the ubiquitous bird of the South. Superstition flamed hotly up in his heart now at the sight of it.

Diane was sewing. He had caught the flutter of her gown beneath a cedar as he stopped the car. There was no one visible in the camp of the Indian girl. Ronador sprang from his car and waved to the girl, smiling, she came to meet him.

Now as Ronador smiled down into the clear, unfaltering eyes of the girl before him, he knew suddenly that he trusted her utterly, that the mad suspicion, sired by the words of Themar and mothered by jealousy, was but a dank mist that melted away in the sunlight of her presence. Only jealousy remained and a smouldering, unscrupulous hate for the persistent young organ-grinder behind him.