The Fighting Shepherdess

"I wanted to surprise you," he said regretfully.

"You have."

"You don't show it."

"Then I'm improving."

"I liked you as you were, Kate--warm-hearted, impulsive." He dropped the bridle reins and sat down beside her.

"That got me nothing," she replied curtly.

A shadow crossed his face.

"And you don't care for anything that doesn't get you something?"

"Absolutely not."

"That doesn't sound like you," he said after a silence.

"I'm not 'me' any longer," she responded. "I made myself over to suit my environment. I get along better."

"What has changed you so much, Kate--what in particular?"

She hesitated a moment, then answered coldly: "Nothing in particular--everything."

"You mean you don't want to tell me?"

"What's the use?" indifferently.

"I might help you."

"How?"

"In ways that friends can help each other."

"I've tried that," she answered dryly.

"You've grown so self-sufficient that you make me feel superfluous and helpless."

"A clinging vine that has nothing to cling to sprawls on the ground, doesn't it?"

Since he did not answer immediately, she reminded him: "Better loosen your horse's cinch; he'll feed better."

He glanced at her oddly as he obeyed her. How practical she was! What she said was the right and sensible thing, of course, but was she, as she seemed, quite without sentiment?

He returned to his place beside her and they sat without speaking, watching the colors change on a bank of sudslike clouds and the shadows deepen in the gulches. It never occurred to the new Kate to make conversation, so she was unembarrassed by the silence. Save for an occasional whimsical soliloquy, she seldom spoke without a definite purpose nowadays. To Disston, who remembered her faculty for finding something interesting or amusing in everything about which to chatter, the difference was noticeable.

It saddened him, the change in her, yet he was conscious that she still retained her strong attraction for him. With nerves relaxed, content, he had an absurd notion that he could sit beside her on that rock indefinitely, without speaking, and be happy.

Kate did not ask him the purpose of his visit, for her etiquette was the etiquette of the ranges, which does not countenance questions, and Disston, absorbed in the beauty of the sunset and his own thoughts, was in no mood to introduce the unpleasant subject of the dynamiting of the sheep wagon.

The pink deepened on gypsum cliffs and sandstone buttes of the distant Bad Lands, while purple shadows crept over the green foothills and blackened the canyons.

"Isn't it wonderful?" he said, finally, in a half whisper.

"Yes," she replied, huskily, wondering if Heaven itself had anything like this to offer.