the engagement weighed on him that he was astounded when he found that she took his marriage as an injury. What had she lost? He had never pretended to care for her. It was she who had put that fool announcement in the paper. And perhaps, with that queer intuition of his where girls and women were concerned, he was not far wrong when he suspected her of secretly enjoying her grievance, of dramatizing herself, publicly and privately, and so indirectly injuring him.
But he underrated one thing. Dramatize herself she could and did, going about with a sad smile that made Sarah Cain long to slap her. He underestimated her passion for him. She had never given him up. What did that deadalive girl over there in the window of the Martin House know about Tom McNair or his kind? When to relax control, and when to tighten it up? How to give and then withhold, so as to keep him guessing?
"I'll give her three months," she said, to Sarah Cain.
"Yes, and you'd give her poison if you had the chance!" said Sarah Cain.
And so things were with all of them when one hot day Tom, standing on a street corner, saw Little Dog passing by in a Ford car.
Carrying weapons was as much against the law in Ursula as in any other civilized town, and it was twenty years since the six-gun on the hip had been a part of the cowboy's outfit, like his chaps and spurs. So Tom's revolver was safely back at the hotel. That fact, and that only, saved him from committing murder that day.
But he did the next best thing, leaped onto the running board and jerked the Indian out, and was in process of choking him to death when the crowd intervened.
As it was, he went to jail for ten days
Kay was bewildered and shocked, her severance from her old world of polite amenities and amiable hypocrisies practically complete. She had a letter from Bessie at that time—Bessie, who loathed writing letters—but she did not reply. What could she say? "We are both well, although Tom is not working yet. Just now he is in jail."
