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I'll warrant you were adept enough at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them." Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate, while his sister went on. "And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"
"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as interesting as Eric Hermannson?" "Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I fancy." "Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a dragon-slayer.
What is it that makes him so different from the others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being." "Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul somewhere.
Wyllis and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward. The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked: "This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else.
Tonight Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one.
"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe. I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence. When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle. "The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis.
But it's all too complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war cry would follow you." "You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more than you do, without saying half so much.
But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true.
You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from Kansas. It's the keynote of this country." Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently: "I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes the taste out of things." She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her own. "Paid?
Den Marse Ben got sick and cum home and brung me along and I staid with 'em 'til I wuz 'bout fo'ty, when I gets married and moved to Wyllis Hill. My wife, was Mary Williams, but she died long time 'go and so did our little son, since dat time I've lived alone." "I think Abraham Lincoln wuz a mighty fine man, he is de 'Saint of de colured race'." "Good day suh."
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