I'll be
more than content to have you boss me around." He hesitated, looking
at the other a bit wistfully. "Of course, you know that if you go, old
boy, I'll go with you. But--" The look he sent towards Teresita,
who appeared definitely upon the porch and stood waiting openly and
impatiently, amply finished the sentence.
Dade's eyes followed Jack's understandingly, and the thing he had
meant to do seemed all at once contemptible, selfish, and weak. He had
meant to leave and take Jack with him, because it hurt him mightily to
see those two falling in love with each other. The trouble his staying
might bring to Don Andres was nothing more nor less than a subterfuge.
If Teresita's smiles had continued to be given to him as they had
been before Jack came, he told himself bitterly, he would never
have thought of going. And Jack thought he hesitated from pure
unselfishness! The fingers that groped mechanically for his tobacco,
though he had no intention of smoking just then, trembled noticeably.
"All right," he said quietly. "I'll stay, then." And a moment after:
"Go ask her if she wants to ride Surry. I promised her she could, next
time she rode."
CHAPTER IX
JERRY SIMPSON, SQUATTER
The senorita, it would seem, had lost interest in the white horse
as well as in his master. That was the construction which Dade
pessimistically put upon her smiling assurance that she could never be
so selfish as to take Senor Hunter's wonderful Surry and condemn him
to some commonplace caballo; though she gave also a better reason than
that, which was that her own horse was already saddled--witness the
peon leading the animal into the patio at that very moment--and that
an exchange would mean delay.
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