He said it earnestly. He was trying to vindicate himself. Just why he
should care to do so he did not know, only that all at once it was very
necessary that he should appear different in the eyes of this girl from,
the other men she had known.
"Will you really?" she asked, turning to look in his face. "Will you
promise that?"
"Why, certainly I will," he said, a trifle embarrassed that she had taken
him at his word. "Of course I will. I tell you it's nothing to me. I only
took a glass at the club occasionally when the other men were drinking,
and sometimes when I went to banquets, class banquets, you know, and
dinners--"
Now the girl had never heard of class banquets, but to take a glass
occasionally when the other men were drinking was what her brothers did;
and so she sighed, and said: "Yes, you may promise, but I know you won't
keep it. Father promised too; but, when he got with the other men, it did
no good. Men are all alike."
"But I'm not," he insisted stoutly. "I tell you I'm not. I don't drink,
and I won't drink. I promise you solemnly here under God's sky that I'll
never drink another drop of intoxicating liquor again if I know it as long
as I live."
He put out his hand toward her, and she put her own into it with a quick
grasp for just an instant.
"Then you're not like other men, after all," she said with a glad ring in
her voice. "That must be why I wasn't so very much afraid of you when I
woke up and found you standing there."
A distinct sense of pleasure came over him at her words. Why it should
make him glad that she had not been afraid of him when she had first seen
him in the wilderness he did not know. He forgot all about his own
troubles. He forgot the lady in the automobile. Right then and there he
dropped her out of his thoughts. He did not know it; but she was
forgotten, and he did not think about her any more during that journey.
Something had erased her. He had run away from her, and he had succeeded
most effectually, more so than he knew.
There in the desert the man took his first temperance pledge, urged
thereto by a girl who had never heard of a temperance pledge in her life,
had never joined a woman's temperance society, and knew nothing about
women's crusades. Her own heart had taught her out of a bitter experience
just how to use her God-given influence.
They came to a long stretch of level ground then, smooth and hard; and the
horses as with common consent set out to gallop shoulder to shoulder in a
wild, exhilarating skim across the plain. Talking was impossible. The man
reflected that he was making great strides in experience, first a prayer
and then a pledge, all in the wilderness. If any one had told him he was
going into the West for this, he would have laughed him to scorn.