Two Friends and a Girl

Howard and Carr rode down into the darkening valley side by side. The silence of the coming dusk was no deeper than that silence which had crept about them while the three stood upon the cliff's edge. Longstreet's laugh had whipped up the colour into Helen's cheeks and had lighted a battle fire in her eyes. She had whisked away from them and gone straight back to the cabin, meaning to save her father from his own artlessness and from the snare of a designing widow. She had remembered to call out a breathless 'Good-night' without turning her head. They had taken their dismissal together, understanding Helen's tortured mood. Each man grave and taciturn, like two automatons they buckled on their spurs, mounted and reined toward the trail.

Then Howard had said merely: 'Come down to the ranch-house, John. I want to talk with you.' And Carr had nodded and acquiesced. Thereafter they were silent again for a long time.

The coming of night is a time of vague veilings, of grotesque transformations, of remoulding and steeping in new dyes. Matter-of-fact objects, clear-cut during the day, assume fantastic shapes; a bush may appear a crouching mountain cat; a rock may masquerade as a mastodon. This is an hour of uncertainties. And doubtings and questionings and uncertainties were other shadow shapes thronging the demesnes of two men's souls. Silence and dim dusk without, dim dusk and silence within.

Once Howard, the lighter spirited of the two, sought to laugh the constraint away.