CHAPTER VI


Donna sat there until sunrise, rocking back and forth, striving to
weave an orderly pattern of reason out of the tangle of unreason in
which she found herself when, confronted by that look in Bob McGraw's
brown eyes. She failed. She could not think calmly. She was conscious
of but one supreme emotion as she gazed at this man who had ridden into
her life, gun in hand. She was happy. Heretofore her life had been
quiet, even, unemotional, always the same--and now she was happy,
riotously, deliriously happy; and it did not occur to her that Bob
McGraw might die. She willed that he should live, for life was love,
and love--what was love? Something that surged, a wave of exquisite
tenderness, through Donna's lonely heart, something that throbbed in
the untouched recesses of her womanhood, arousing in her a fierce,
almost primitive desire to possess this man, to fondle his auburn head,
to caress him, to work for him, slave for him, to show her gratitude
and adoration by living for him, and--if need be--by dying for him!

It occurred to her presently that there was nothing so very unmaidenly
in her action, after all. She felt no distinct loss of womanly reserve
--no crumbling of the foundations of dignity. She still had those
attributes; to-morrow, when she returned to the cashier's counter at
the eating-house, she would still have these defensive weapons against
the invasions of the sensual, smirking, patronizing male brutes with
which every passing train appeared to be filled; the well-dressed,
hard-finished city men, who held her cheap because she presided behind
an eating-house cash-register. How well she knew their quick, bold
stares, their so clumsy subterfuges to enter into conversation with her;