“I'm not sure your folks would like it,” he said Stiffly.
“You didn't come to see my folks, did you?”
He did not smile. He looked as though he had forgotten how. “I guess,” he said grimly, “I ought to apologize for —for what happened at the dance.”
His voice and his face are so hard, Amy thought. But she said in the same quiet voice, “Not unless you want to.”
“Well, I apologize.” As though he were reading it from a book. “I didn't mean for you to get mixed up in it.” They stood for a moment in uneasy silence. Then he added, “I rented this rig for the rest of the day. I thought maybe you'd like to ride over toward Stone Ridge with me.”
Amy's eyes widened in surprise. “Stone Ridge?”
“I won a piece of land over there last night. I thought I might as well see what it looks like.”
So he has won some land, Amy thought slowly. Over a gambling table in Bert Surratt's place, probably. A little chill went over her, and she saw for the first time how much he resembled his father.
“Of course,” he said bluntly, “if you don't want to go...”
But Amy knew that she would go. Never in her life had she turned down one of Jeff Blaine's rare invitations. She said, “I'll have to get a bonnet, and tell Mother.”
Mrs. Wintworth looked at her daughter in dismay. “Stone Ridge! Amy, the whole town will talk!”
“The town will talk anyway,” Amy said. Then she turned to her mother and added gently, “Don't you see? He's hurt and angry and thinks the whole world is his enemy. If I turned against him now, there's no telling what he'd do.”
Her mother blinked in disbelief. “Amy, you can't mean that you actually care what happens to a ruffian like Jeff Blaine!”
Amy's face turned blank as she put on her bonnet. “I'll do the dishes when I get back,” she said quietly.
They rode in silence along Main Street. Heads turned to watch as they passed. Amy could feel their disapproving stares. She could almost hear their clucking tongues as they shook their heads from side to side. The corners of Jeff's mouth lifted slightly in a cold, humorless smile.
They took the old stage road out of town and headed north toward the hills. The parched land lay spread out before them, dazzling yellow and shimmering in the sun. There was a great silence broken only by buggy wheels and hoofs, and now and then a field lark's cry. Some of that big country's lonesomeness fell around Amy as the noisy activity of the town fell behind them.
Amy found herself thinking back to other times, to the years of her childhood. She found herself watching Jeff Blaine's hard young face, wondering what it was about those intense eyes and thin mouth that had always drawn her to him.
Being wise in so many things, it was strange that she understood so little of the man himself. Amy, whose young will could control a headstrong man like Ford Wintworth, learned early that the harder you held to Jeff Blaine the easier he slipped away. He was quicksilver; he was mystery. And within his strong body was locked the secret of his own doom.
Much of this was foolishness, of course, the product of a romantic girl's too-active imagination, and in an objective way Amy knew it. Certainly there was nothing mysterious about a barefoot boy who was too muleheaded and stubborn to come to one of her parties—the kind of boy Jeff had once been, before Nathan Blaine had filled him with his own importance, spoiled him and brought to life an arrogance and violence that most men were content to leave sleeping.
In her quiet way, Amy hated Nathan Blaine. She hated the man's arrogance, and the way he had tossed his big head and stared down at you with those dark eyes. Most of all she hated him for the bragging bully that he had made of his own son, and for this she would not forgive him.
In Amy's cold, woman's logic, she could almost admire Beulah Sewell for the thing she had done! With Nathan out of his life, Jeff had become a boy again with normal feelings and emotions.
Now Amy wished for the impossible. Gladly would she have stood up for Beulah's lie, but she knew that it would only bring Jeff's rage down upon her. And besides, lies were not practical. Despite all good intent, their cut was cruel when they were found out, as Beulah Sewell came to know.
Still, Amy admired Beulah's courage. Beulah had seen what Nathan Blaine was doing to the boy and she had done what she could to stop it.
At the moment it did not occur to Amy that Beulah had self-righteously taken the law into her own hands. The end, it seemed to Amy, was_ worth the means, and that the plan had failed was its only fault.
Now, as the buggy rolled across that wide prairie, Amy gazed out over the shaggy grassland dotted here and there with patches of nester corn. Jeff had not said more than a dozen words since the town had fallen behind them, but now he waved abruptly toward the fields of corn.
“Good grassland. Soon it'll all be plowed up and blown away.”
That was what the cattlemen had been saying since the first nester sank his dugout in Landow County, but the land was still there and the corn thrived. Amy looked at him, but said nothing. Sooner or later he would get around to telling her of other things. She was good at waiting.
“There's Stone Ridge,” he said after a while, pointing to a hogback hump of scrub and sandstone in the distance. “Two sections over there somewhere were deeded to me this morning. Not much to graze beef cattle on, but it's something.”
Amy spoke for the first time. “Two sections is a lot of land to some people. You haven't said how you got it.”
Jeff shot her a quick glance. “I told you I won it. At poker, from a nester.”
Amy felt that small chill go over her again, and she looked away from those intense eyes that reminded her so much of his father. She heard herself saying quietly, “I didn't know you were such a good gambler.”
“Good?” He laughed shortly. “I was lucky. I'm no great shakes as a gambler right now, but I'll learn. My pa said I had a natural talent for it.”
“Oh,” she said softly, but if he heard the note of dismay in her voice, he did not show it. “Is that what you mean to make of yourself, a gambler?”
Now he did look at her, levelly. “Is there anything wrong with that?”
Her voice sounded weak. “I don't know. I've never known any gamblers.”
“Maybe you'd like me to do something else,” he said shortly. “Maybe I could learn to clean your pa's stables.”
The tone of his voice angered her. “You don't have to clean stables,” she replied cuttingly. “Your uncle was good enough to teach you a trade.”
He grew rigid, high color flushing his cheeks. “I don't want to talk about the Sewells! I don't want to hear their name mentioned!”
They rode in stiff, uncomfortable silence for several minutes. At last he said, “Amy, I didn't mean to bark at you. I'm sorry.”