ning for, and Lou answered, jerking his head toward the distant black spur:
“Ted Douglas has just taken Jimmie up there—to vow to love, cherish and protect him, I suppose. It’s a great thing to have a mate—for the mate.”
Here Lou spoke raw truth. Because seven kinds of love out of eight are one-sided, and the world knows that the eighth is the same.
Beyond the black spur Douglas lay on the dead bracken, and smoked in a silence that hurt him. Jimmie drew his thin little knees under the clasp of his hands, and stared down the tussock gully where sheep fed on the snow-loosened slopes. Presently he said:
“Don’t see as it’s a thing to get in a sweat about, anyways.”
“Don’t you?” Ted Douglas sat up, and his strong unlined face was tender. “Ah, but you knows that you does! You can’t come that over me, Jimmie. I’m ’feared this is too tough a place for you, lad. Cattle-work puts grit into a man; but it puts the devil into him too. Our chaps have got it proper. They won’t stand any sort o’ funkin’, an’ you———”
“I got a tongue ter skin ’em with. That’s more’n you hev.”
Douglas felt his great muscles where the sleeves fell away from the forearm.
“I wonder what it feels like to feel afraid,” he said slowly.
