The rider had clanked into the court, a tired yet wary
man, always looking for the attack upon him that was inevitable
and might come from any quarter; and he had walked right upon
little Fay. The child had been beautiful even in her rags and
amid the surroundings of the hovel in the sage, but now, in a
pretty white dress, with her shining curls brushed and her face
clean and rosy, she was lovely. She left her play and looked up
at Lassiter.
If there was not an instinct for all three of them in that
meeting, an unreasoning tendency toward a closer intimacy, then
Jane Withersteen believed she had been subject to a queer fancy.
She imagined any child would have feared Lassiter. And Fay Larkin
had been a lonely, a solitary elf of the sage, not at all an
ordinary child, and exquisitely shy with strangers. She watched
Lassiter with great, round, grave eyes, but showed no fear. The
rider gave Jane a favorable report of cattle and horses; and as
he took the seat to which she invited him, little Fay edged as
much as half an inch nearer. Jane replied to his look of inquiry
and told Fay's story. The rider's gray, earnest gaze troubled
her. Then he turned to Fay and smiled in a way that made Jane
doubt her sense of the true relation of things. How could
Lassiter smile so at a child when he had made so many children
fatherless? But he did smile, and to the gentleness she had seen
a few times he added something that was infinitely sad and sweet.
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