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Not a breath of air fanned the poplars, straight and motionless, in front of the house. The sun buried itself in a solid wall of black that rose above the Costejo peaks, hidden now in the shadow of the coming storm. The horses were dripping with sweat their coats as glossy and wet as if they had swum the river.
"Don't forget it, Parker," Skinny called earnestly, "I actually need it!" Carolyn June and Skinny stood on the porch and watched the car climb the grade and out on to the bench. The storm of the night before had washed the earth clean and cooled the air. A faint after-breeze fanned the tree-tops. The Costejo peaks stood out, with stereoscopical clearness, against a cloudless sky.
Frequently he turned longing eyes toward Eagle Butte, anxious for sight of the cloud of dust from which Chuck would emerge bringing, he hoped, word that Carolyn June and Ophelia Cobb had heeded the misleading message. The sun crept across the western sky and dropped lower and lower until it hung at last, a blazing disk of fire, close above the highest peaks of the Costejo mountain range.
The night was more than half gone and still she sat on the front porch and watched the gradual spread of a misty, silvery sheen over the brow of the bench and the distant peaks of the shadowy Costejo range as the pale moon, in its last half, lifted itself above the sand-hills at the gap through which the Cimarron tumbled out of the valley. Old Heck and Ophelia had retired hours ago.
After a time Captain Jack quit feeding and came into the shade of the piñons. The Ramblin' Kid, flat on his back, stared through the scant foliage of the trees into the sky overcast now with a dim haze, forerunner of the storm gathering above the Costejo peaks. Thousands of feet in the air a buzzard, merely a black speck, without motion of wings, wheeled in great, lazy, ever-widening circles.
Dimly through the darkness she saw two riders pass up the grade that led to the bench and turn their horses to the west, toward Eagle Butte, and ride straight into the outflung shadow of the thunder-storm from which now and then leaped jagged flashes of lightning and which was rolling from the Costejo Mountains across the Kiowa range in the direction of the Quarter Circle KT.
The moon crept across the heavens and was hanging above the shadowy peaks of the Costejo Mountains when the Ramblin' Kid returned to the sleeping Quarter Circle KT, slipped the saddle from the back of the Gold Dust maverick and turned the filly and Captain Jack into the circular corral. He had ridden the outlaw mare almost to Eagle Butte. She had learned her lesson.
Sing Pete trotted around the group and poured black, blistering-hot coffee into the unbreakable cups on the ground at the side of the hungry, dusty riders. The sun had just dipped into the ragged peaks of the Costejo range and a reddish-purple crown lay on the crest of Sentinel Mountain forty miles to the southeast.
They had just returned to the Quarter Circle KT, unsaddled their horses, turned them into the pasture, gone to the house and stopped a moment on the front porch to watch the glow in the west the sun was dipping into a thundercap over the Costejo Mountains when the Clagstone "Six" rolled down the grade and up to the string of poplars before the house. "Gee, we thought you two had eloped!"
The black cloud bank that had hung over the Costejo Mountains earlier in the evening now covered the whole western half of the sky. Night sounds seemed almost stifled by the suffocating heat. From the pasture below the stables the faint call of a kill-deer suddenly shrilled out, followed by intense silence.
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