lins did not know just what his feeling toward Edith was. At the best a sort of hopeful, perhaps a bit wistful, friendship, very like his feeling towards that country where he had taken up his claim. There was something big to be done before he could call it his own.
Youth has its way of adjusting these things without many words. It is only when the eye begins to grow flat, the waistline to expand, that the lover has need of sonnets. Youth does not require pretty sayings, lengthy presentations of its case in sentimental speech. It arrives at the contest fully equipped.
In that way the case stood without words between Rawlins and Edith Stone. There was something big to be accomplished before he could think of her in nearer terms. Maybe with Edith it was different. The woman leaps on to her conclusion without so much as barking her shins on the roughest obstacles which lie between the now of reality and the then of her desire.
Only when Peck talked of Edith in that loosetongued, regretful way, Rawlins felt his interest in her to be something more than remotely friendly. Perhaps that was only the resentment of youth for the man's boorish familiarity.
"It's going to be all right," Rawlins repeated, rubbing it in her hand like a liniment; "everything's going to be all right. Has your aunt gone to bed?"
"No, she's not here. We've had a sensation of our own here to-day, Ned. What do you think? Peck's run away again, and not only run away, but taken a band of eleven or twelve hundred sheep along with him. Aunt Lila's out on the range hunting them now
