The Whispering Outlaw by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand [Brand, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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XVII. — THE UNWANTED ESCORT

When Rose Kenworthy reached her room, that night, she was in a wild turmoil indeed. She had told her father that she must have another day to consider the proposal of young Glenhollen, and not only that, but she had maintained a resolute silence in the face of his eloquent thunders. He pictured for her the glory of the united estates. But though his speech would have convinced any audience of voting citizens, it could not shake his daughter.

When she sat in her room, at last, she wondered what had made her so steadfast. It was not that she saw more faults in Glenhollen; he remained to her eye the same clean-minded, straight-thinking young fellow she had always known. But now she knew that a man could be something more, and it was the man of the forest who had taught her. She sat for a long time at her window, with her elbows on the sill and her eyes on the stars above the mountains, trying to call up not so much his face as the strange and new emotion which had filled her when he was close. It was a difficult feeling to analyze, but in part it was like the eery delight of a child in a new home surrounded with new toys.

Yet there was a melancholy sense of loss, too, as though in leaving her, he had carried away part of her very self with him in his wanderings. Her sadness was the loneliness of the solitary mountains among which he lived. If the thought of the wild and free life made her look up with a smile, the thought of a bleak death with no hand to tend him made her look down again with a sigh. For this would be his end—a broken leg from a fall, or the sweep of a snowslide as he ventured up some terrible steep—and he would perish unknown.

She sighed as the picture came up before her, and again that strong impulse to meet him once more and try the power of persuasion to bring him back to the ways of civilized men rose within her; for he admitted that she indeed had some influence upon him—an influence which he feared so much that he shrank from her. At this recollection, she smiled faintly to herself. The wind swooping across the garden blew a delicate commingling of perfumes to her, and the stars were blurred by tears that came suddenly into her eyes. She wondered dimly at their coming.

Of one thing at least she was convinced; she could not venture out into the night to meet him, as she had promised. What mad impulse could ever have induced her to suggest such a meeting? Thinking back to it, with a little shiver of wonder, she felt as though it had been a different person who sat there in the garden talking with the wild man. So, taking a firm hold upon herself, she

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