Since nothing in this world is absolutely immutable--the human emotions least of all, perhaps--Billy Louise did not hold changeless her broken faith in Ward. She saw it broken into fragments before the evidence of her own eyes, and the fragments ground to dust beneath the weight of what she knew of his past--things he had told her himself. So she thought there was no more faith in him, and her heart went empty and aching through the next few days.
But, since Billy Louise was human, and a woman--not altogether because she was twenty!--she stopped, after awhile, gathered carefully the dust of her dead faith, and, like God, she began to create. First she fashioned doubts of her doubt. How did she know she had not made a mistake, there at that corral? Other men wore gray hats and rode dark bay horses; other men were slim and tall--and she had only had a glimpse after all, and the light was deceptive down there in the shadows. When that first doubt was molded, and she had breathed into it the breath of life so that it stood sturdily before her, she took heart and created reasons, a whole company of them, to tell her why she ought to give Ward the benefit of the doubt. She remembered what Charlie Fox had said about circumstantial evidence. She would not make the mistake he had made.
So she spent other days and long, wakeful nights. And since it seemed impossible to bring her faith to life again just as it had been, with the glamor of romance and the sweetness of pity and the strength of her own innocence to make it a beautiful faith indeed, she used all her innocence and all her pity and a little of romance and created something even sweeter than her untried faith had been. She had a new element to strengthen it. She knew that she loved Ward; she had learned that from the hurt it had given her to lose her faith in him.
That was the record of the inner Billy Louise which no one ever saw. The Billy Louise which her little world knew went her way unchanged, except in small details that escaped the notice of those nearest her. A look in her eyes, for one thing; a hurt, questioning look that was sometimes rebellious as well; a droop of her mouth, also, when she was off her guard; a sad, tired little droop that told of the weight of responsibility and worry she was carrying.
Ward observed both, the minute he saw her on the trail. He had come across country on the chance that she might be riding out that way, and he had come upon her unawares while she and Blue were staring out over the desert from the height they had attained in the hills.