CHAPTER XVAN ARGUMENT ENDS

233CHAPTER XVAN ARGUMENT ENDS

Morning found Agnes only the more firmly determined to bear her troubles alone. Smith came by early. He looked curiously at the revolver, which she still carried at her waist, but there was approval in his eyes. The sight of the weapon seemed to cheer Smith, and make him easier in his mind about something that had given him unrest. She heard him singing as he passed on to his work. Across the river the bride was singing also, and there seemed to be a song in even the sound of the merry axes among the cottonwoods, where her neighboring settler and his two lank sons were chopping and hewing the logs for their cabin. But there was no song in her own heart, where it was needed most.She knew that Jerry Boyle had camped somewhere near the stage-road, where he could watch her coming and going to carry the demand on Dr. Slavens which he had left with her. He would be watching the road even now, and he would watch all day, or perhaps ride up there to learn the reason when he failed to see her pass. She tied back the flaps of her tent to let the wind blow through, and to show any caller that she was not at home, then saddled her horse and rode away into the hills. It needed a day of solitude, she thought, to come234to a conclusion on the question how she was to face it out with Jerry Boyle. Whether to stay and fight the best that she was able, or to turn and fly, leaving all her hopes behind, was a matter which must be determined before night.In pensive mood she rode on, giving her horse its head, but following a general course into the east. As her wise animal picked its way over the broken ground, she turned the situation in her mind.There was no doubt that she had been indiscreet in the manner of taking up her homestead, but she could not drive herself to the belief that she had committed a moral crime. And the doctor. He would drop all his prospects in the land that he held if she should call on him, she well believed. He was big enough for a sacrifice like that, with never a question in his honest eyes to cloud the generosity of the act. If she had him by to advise her in this hour, and to benefit by his wisdom and courage, she sighed, how comfortable it would be.Perhaps she should have gone, mused she, pursuing this thought, to his place, and put the thing before him in all its ugliness, with no reservations, no attempts to conceal or defend. He could have told her how far her act was punishable. Perhaps, at the most, it would mean no more than giving up the claim, which was enough, considering all that she had founded on it. Yes, she should have ridden straight to Dr. Slavens; that would have been the wiser course.235Considering whether she would have time to go and return that day, wasted as the morning was, she pulled up her horse and looked around to see if she could estimate by her location the distance from her camp. That she had penetrated the country east of the river farther than ever before, was plain at a glance. The surroundings were new to her. There was more vegetation, and marks of recent grazing everywhere.She mounted the hill-crest for a wider survey, and there in a little valley below her she saw a flock of sheep grazing, while farther along the ridge stood a sheep-wagon, a strange and rather disconcerting figure striding up and down beside it.Doubtless it was the shepherd, she understood. But a queer figure he made in that place; and his actions were unusual, to say the least, in one of his sedate and melancholy calling. He was a young man, garbed in a long, black coat, tattered more or less about the skirts and open in front, displaying his red shirt. His hair was long upon his collar, and his head was bare.As he walked up and down a short beat near his wagon, the shepherd held in his hand a book, which he placed before his eyes with a flourish now, and then with a flourish withdrew it, meantime gesticulating with his empty hand in the most extravagant fashion. His dog, sharper of perception than its master, lay aside from him a little way, its ears pricked up, its sharp nose lifted, sniffing the scent of the stranger. But it gave no alarm.236Agnes felt that the man must be harmless, whatever his peculiarities. She rode forward, bent on asking him how far she had strayed from the river. As she drew near, she heard him muttering and declaiming, illustrating his arguments of protestation with clenched fist and tossing head, his long hair lifting from his temples in the wind.He greeted her respectfully, without sign of perturbation or surprise, as one well accustomed to the society of people above the rank of shepherd.“My apparent eccentric behavior at the moment when you first saw me, madam, or miss, perhaps, most likely I should say, indeed––”Agnes nodded, smiling, to confirm his penetration.“So, as I was saying, my behavior may have led you into doubt of my balance, and the consequent question of your safety in my vicinity,” he continued.“Nothing of the kind, I assure you,” said she. “I thought you might be a–a divinity student by your dress, or maybe a candidate for the legal profession.”“Neither,” he disclaimed. “I am a philosopher, and at the moment you first beheld me I was engaged in a heated controversy with Epictetus, whoseDiscoursesI hold in my hand. We are unable to agree on many points, especially upon the point which he assumes that he has made in the discussion of grief. He contends that when one is not blamable for some calamity which bereaves him or strips him of his possessions, grief is unmanly, regret inexcusable.237“‘How?’ say I, meeting him foot to foot on the controversy, ‘in case I lose my son, my daughter, my wife–the wife of my soul and heart–shall I not grieve? shall I not be permitted the solace of a tear?’“And Epictetus: ‘Were you to blame for the disease which cut them off? Did you light the fire which consumed them, or sink the ship which carried them down?’“‘No,’ I answer; ‘but because I’m blameless shall I become inhuman, and close my heart to all display of tenderness and pain?’“And there we have it, miss, over and over again. Ah, I am afraid we shall never agree!”“It is lamentable,” Agnes agreed, believing that the young man’s life in the solitudes had unsettled his mind. “I never agree with him on that myself.”The philosopher’s hollow, weathered face glowed as she gave this testimony. He drew a little nearer to her, shaking the long, dark, loose hair back from his forehead.“I am glad that you don’t think me demented,” said he. “Many, who do not understand the deeper feelings of the soul, do believe it. The hollow-minded and the unstable commonly lose their small balance of reason in these hills, miss, with no companionship, month in and month out, but a dog and the poor, foolish creatures which you see in the valley yonder. But to one who is a philosopher, and a student of the higher things, this situation offers room for the expansion of238the soul. Mine has gone forth and enlarged here; it has filled the universe.”“But a man of your education and capabilities,” she suggested, thinking to humor him, “ought to be more congenially situated, it seems to me. There must be more remunerative pursuits which you could follow?”“Remuneration for one may not be reward for another,” he told her. “I shall remain here until my mission is accomplished.”He turned to his flock, and, with a motion of the arm, sped his dog to fetch in some stragglers which seemed straying off waywardly over the crest of the opposite hill. As he stood so she marked his ascetic gauntness, and noted that the hand which swung at his side twitched and clenched, and that the muscles of his cleanly shaved jaws swelled as he locked his teeth in determination.“Your mission?” she asked, curious regarding what it might be, there in the solitude of those barren hills.“I see that you are armed,” he observed irrelevantly, as if the subject of his mission had been put aside. “I have a very modern weapon of that pattern in the wagon, but there is little call for the use of it here. Perhaps you live in the midst of greater dangers than I?”“I’m one of the new settlers over in the river bottom,” she explained. “I rode up to ask you how far I’d strayed from home.”“It’s about seven miles across to the river, I should estimate,” he told her. “I graze up to the boundary239of the reservation, and it’s called five miles from there.”“Thank you; I think I’ll be going back then.”“Will you do me the favor to look at this before you go?” he asked, drawing a folded paper from the inner pocket of his coat and handing it to her.It was a page from one of those so-calledDirectorieswhich small grafters go about devising in small cities and out-on-the-edge communities, in which the pictures of the leading citizens are printed for a consideration. The page had been folded across the center; it was broken and worn.“You may see the person whose portrait is presented there,” said he, “and if you should see him, you would confer a favor by letting me know.”“Why, I saw him yesterday!” she exclaimed in surprise. “It’s Jerry Boyle!”The sheep-herder’s eyes brightened. A glow came into his brown face.“You do well to go armed where that wolf ranges!” said he. “You know him–you saw him yesterday. Is he still there?”“Why, I think he’s camped somewhere along the river,” she told him, unable to read what lay behind the excitement in the man’s manner.He folded the paper and returned it to his pocket, his breath quick upon his lips. Suddenly he laid hold of her bridle with one hand, and with the other snatched the revolver from her low-swinging holster.“Don’t be alarmed,” said he; “but I want to know.240Tell me true–lean over and whisper in my ear. Is he your friend?”“No, no! Far from it!” she whispered, complying with his strange order out of fear that his insanity, flaming as it was under the spur of some half-broken memory, might lead him to take her life.He gave her back the revolver and released the horse.“Go,” said he. “But don’t warn him, as you value your own life! My mission here is to kill that man!”Perhaps it was a surge of unworthiness which swept her, lifting her heart like hope. The best of us is unworthy at times; the best of us is base. Selfishness is the festering root of more evil than gold. In that flash it seemed to her that Providence had raised up an arm to save her. She leaned over, her face bright with eagerness.“Has he wronged you, too?” she asked.He lifted his hand to his forehead slowly, as if in a gesture of pain. The blood had drained from his face; his cheek-bones were marked white through his wind-hardened skin.“It’s not a subject to be discussed with a woman, sir,” said he absently. “There was a wife–somewhere there was a wife! This man came between us. I was not then what I am today–a shepherd on the hills.... But I must keep you here; you will betray me and warn him if I let you go!” he cried, rousing suddenly, catching her bridle again.241“No, I’ll not warn him,” Agnes assured him.“If I thought you would”–he hesitated, searching her face with his fevered eyes, in which red veins showed as in the eyes of an angry dog–“I’d have to sacrifice you!”Agnes felt that she never could draw her weapon in time, in case the eccentric tried to take it away again, and her heart quailed as she measured the distance she would have to ride before the fall of the ground would protect her, even if she should manage to break his hold on the bridle, and gallop off while he was fetching his pistol from the wagon.“I’ll not warn him,” said she, placing her hand on his arm. “I give you my sincere word that I’ll do nothing to save him from what I feel to be your just vengeance.”“Go, before I doubt you again!” he cried, slapping her horse with his palm as he let go the bridle.From the tip of the hill she looked back. He had disappeared–into the wagon, she supposed; and she made haste to swerve from the straight course to put another hill between them, in case he might run after her, his mad mind again aflame with the belief that she would cheat him of his revenge.Agnes arrived in camp full of tremors and contradictory emotions. One minute she felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself242of this impulse by arguing that the insane sheep-herder was plainly the instrument of fate–she lacked the temerity, after the first flush, to credit it to Providence–lifted up to throw his troubles between her and her own.She sat in the sun before her tent thinking it over, for and against, cooling considerably and coming to a saner judgment of the situation. Every little while she looked toward the hills, to see if the shepherd had followed her. She had seen no horse in the man’s camp; he could not possibly make it on foot, under two hours, even if he came at all, she told herself.Perhaps it was an imaginary grievance, based upon the reputation which Boyle had earned for himself; maybe the poor, declaiming philosopher had forgotten all about it by now, and had returned to his discourses and his argument. She brewed a pot of tea, for the shadows were marking noonday, and began to consider riding down the river to find Boyle and tell him of the man’s threat, leaving him to follow his own judgment in the matter. His conscience would tell him whether to stand or fly.Strong as her resentment was against the man who had come into her plans so unexpectedly and thrown them in a tangle, she felt that it would be wrong to her own honesty to conceal from him the knowledge of his danger. Perhaps there remained manliness enough in him to cause him to withdraw his avaricious scheme to oust Dr. Slavens in return for a service like that.243She determined at last to seek Boyle in his camp.She brought up her horse and saddled it, took a look around camp to see that everything was in shape–for she liked to leave things tidy, in case some of the neighbors should stop in–and was about to mount, when a man’s head and shoulders appeared from behind her own cottonwood log. A glance showed her that it was the sheep-herder. His head was bare, his wild hair in his eyes.He got to his feet, his pistol in his hand.“I watched you,” said he, sheathing the weapon, as if he had changed his mind about the use of it. “I knew you’d go!”“But I didn’t intend to when I parted from you up there on the hill,” she declared, greatly confused over being caught in this breach of faith with even a crazy man.“I considered that, too,” said the philosopher. “But I watched you. I’ll never be fool enough to entirely trust a woman again. You all lie!”She wondered how he had arrived there so quickly and silently, for he gave no evidence of fatigue or heat. She did not know the dry endurance which a life like his builds up in a man. Sheep-herders in that country are noted for their fleetness. It is a common saying of them that their heels are as light as their heads.But there he was, at any rate, and her good intentions toward Boyle must be surrendered. Conscience had a palliative in the fact that she had meant to go.244“Heaven knows I have as little reason to wish him well as you!” said she, speaking in low voice, as if to herself, as she began to undo the saddle girth.“Stay here, then,” said the sheep-herder, watching her with glistening eyes. “I’ll kill him for both of us! Where is his camp?”“I don’t know,” she replied, shuddering.The demented shepherd’s way of speaking of taking a human life, even though a worthless one, or a vicious one, was eager and hungry. He licked his lips like a dog.“You said he was camped on the river. Where?”“I don’t know,” she returned again.“I’ll tell you,” said he, staying her hand as she tugged on a strap. “Both of us will go! You shall ride, and I’ll run beside you. But”–he bent over, grinding his teeth and growling between them–“you sha’n’t help kill him! That’s for me, alone!”She drew back from his proposal with a sudden realization of what a desperately brutal thing this unstrung creature was about to do, with a terrible arraignment of self-reproach because she had made no effort to dissuade him or place an obstacle in the way of accomplishing his design. It was not strange, thought she, with a revulsion of self-loathing, that he accepted her as a willing accomplice and proposed that she bear a hand. Even her effort to ride and find Boyle had been half-hearted. She might have gone, she told herself, before the herder arrived.245“No, no! I couldn’t go! I couldn’t!” she cried, forgetting that she was facing an unbalanced man, all the force of pleading in her voice.“No, you want to kill him yourself!” he charged savagely. “Give me that horse–give it to me, I tell you! I’ll go alone!”He sprang into the saddle, not waiting to adjust the stirrups to his long legs. With his knees pushed up like a jockey’s, he rode off, the pointer of chance, or the cunning of his own inscrutable brain, directing him the way Boyle had gone the evening before.His going left her nerveless and weak. She sat and watched him out of sight beyond the cottonwoods and willows, thinking what a terrible thing it was to ride out with the cold intention of killing a man. This man was irresponsible; the strength of his desire for revenge had overwhelmed his reason. The law would excuse him of murder, for in the dimness of his own mind there was no conception of crime.But what excuse could there be for one who sat down in deliberation––Base Jerry Boyle might be, ready to sacrifice unfeelingly the innocent for his own pleasure and gain, ready to strike at their dearest hopes, ready to trample under his feet the green gardens of their hearts’ desire; yet, who should sit in judgment on him, or seek a justification in his deeds to–to–– Even then she could not bring her thoughts to express it, although her wild heart had sung over it less than twenty-four hours before.246A shiver of sickness turned her cold. With quick, nervous fingers she unbuckled the belt which held her revolver and cartridges; she carried the weapon into the tent and flung it to the ground.At dusk the sheep-herder returned, with the horse much blown.“He had been there, but he’s gone,” he announced. “I followed him eastward along the stage-road, but lost his trail.”He dismounted and dropped the reins to the ground. Agnes set about to relieve the tired animal of the burden of the saddle, the sheep-herder offering no assistance. He stood with his head bent, an air of dejection and melancholy over him, a cloud upon his face. Presently he walked away, saying no more. She watched him as he went, moodily and unheeding of his way, until he passed out of view around a thicket of tangled shrubs which grew upon the river-bank.While her horse was relieving his weariness in contented sighs over his oats, Agnes made a fire and started her evening coffee. She had a feeling of cleanness in her conscience, and a lightness of heart which she knew never could have been her own to enjoy again if the crazed herder had come back with blood upon his hands.There was no question about the feeling of loneliness that settled down upon her with aching intensity when she sat down to her meal, spread on a box, the lantern a yellow speck in the boundless night. A rod247away its poor, futile glimmer against such mighty odds was understood, standing there with no encompassing walls to mark the boundary of its field. It was like the struggle of a man who stands alone in the vastness of life with no definite aim to circumscribe his endeavor, wasting his feeble illumination upon a little rod of earth.We must have walls around us, both lanterns and men, rightly to fill the sphere of our designed usefulness; walls to restrain our wastrel forces; walls to bind our lustful desires, our foolish ambitions, our outwinging flights. Yet, in its way, the lantern served nobly, as many a man serves in the circle which binds his small adventures, and beyond which his fame can never pass.From the door of her tent Agnes looked out upon the lantern, comparing herself with it, put down there as she was in that blank land, which was still in the night of its development. Over that place, which she had chosen to make a home and a refuge, her own weak flame would fall dimly, perhaps never able to light it all. Would it be worth the struggle, the heart-hunger for other places and things, the years of waiting, the toil and loneliness?She went back to her supper, the cup which she had gone to fetch in her hand. The strength of night made her heart timid; the touch of food was dry and tasteless upon her lips. For the first time since coming to that country she felt the pain of discouragement.248What could she do against such a great, rough thing? Would it ever be worth the labor it would cost?Feeble as her light was against the night, it was enough to discover tears upon her cheeks as she sat there upon the ground. Her fair hair lay dark in the shadows, and light with that contrast which painters love, where it lifted in airy rise above her brow. And there were the pensive softness of her chin, the sweep of her round throat, the profile as sharp as a shadow against the mellow glow. Perhaps the lantern was content in its circumscribed endeavor against the night, when it could light to such good advantage so much loveliness.“If I’d have put my hands over your eyes, who would you have named?” asked a voice near her ear, a voice familiar, and fitted in that moment with old associations.“I’d have had no trouble in guessing, Jerry, for I was expecting you,” she answered, scarcely turning her head, although his silent manner of approach had startled her.“Agnes, I don’t believe you’ve got any more nerves than an Indian,” he said, dropping down beside her.“If one wanted to make a facetious rejoinder, the opening is excellent,” she said, fighting back her nervousness with a smile. “Will you have some supper?”“I’d like it, if you don’t mind.”249She busied herself with the stove, but he peremptorily took away from her the office of feeding the fire, and watched her as she put bacon on to fry.“Agnes, you ought to have been frying bacon for me these four years past–figuratively, I mean,” he remarked, musingly.“If you don’t mind, we’ll not go back to that,” she said.Boyle made no mention of the purpose of his visit. He made his supper with ambassadorial avoidance of the subject which lay so uneasily on her mind. When he had finished, he drew out his tobacco-sack and rolled a cigarette, and, as it dangled from his lip by a shred of its wrapping, he turned to her.“Well?” he asked.She was standing near the lantern, removing the few utensils–the bacon had been served to him in the pan–from her outdoor table. When she answered him she turned away until her face was hidden in the shadow.“I didn’t carry your message to Dr. Slavens as you ordered, Jerry.”“I know it,” said he. “What next?”“I guess it’s ‘up to you,’ as you put it. I’m not going to try to save myself at the expense of any of my friends.”Boyle got up. He took a little turn away from the box whereon the lantern stood, as if struggling to maintain the fair front he had worn when he appeared.250After a little he turned and faced her, walking back slowly until only the length of the little stove was between them.“Have you considered your own danger?” he asked.“It wouldn’t help you a great deal here, among these rough, fair-minded people, to take an advantage like that of a woman, especially when her transgression is merely technical and not intentional,” she rejoined.“I wouldn’t have to appear in it,” he assured her.“Well, set the United States marshal after me as soon as you want to; I’ll be here,” she said, speaking with the even tone of resignation which one commands when the mind has arrived at a determined stand to face the last and worst.“Agnes, I told you yesterday that I was all over the old feeling that I had for you.”Boyle leaned forward as he spoke, his voice earnest and low.“But that was a bluff. I’m just as big a fool as I ever was about it. If you want to walk over me, go ahead; if you want to–oh, rats! But I’ll tell you; if you’ll come away with me I’ll drop all of this. I’ll leave that tin-horn doctor where he is, and let him make what he can out of his claim.”“I couldn’t marry you, Jerry; it’s impossible to think of that,” she told him gently.“Oh, well, that’s a formality,” he returned, far more in his voice than his words. “I’ll say to you––”“You’ve said too much!” she stopped him, feeling251her cheeks burn under the outrage which he had offered to her chaste heart. “There’s no room for any more words between you and me–never! Go now–say no more!”She walked across the bright ring of light toward the tent, making a little detour around him, as if afraid that his violent words might be followed by violent deeds.Boyle turned where he stood, following her with his eyes. The light of the lantern struck him strongly up to the waist, leaving his head and shoulders in the gloom above its glare. His hands were in the pockets of his trousers, his shoulders drooping forward in that horseback stoop which years in the saddle had fastened on him.Agnes had reached the tent, where she stood with her hand on the flap, turning a hasty look behind her, when a shot out of the dark from the direction of the river-bank struck her ears with a suddenness and a portent which seemed to carry the pain of death. She was facing that way; she saw the flash of it; she saw Jerry Boyle leap with lithe agility, as if springing from the scourge of flames, and sling his pistol from the hostler under his coat.In his movement there was an admirable quickness, rising almost to the dignity of beauty in the rapidity with which he adjusted himself to meet this sudden exigency. In half the beat of a heart, it seemed, he had fired. Out of the dark came another leap of flame,252another report. Boyle walked directly toward the point from which it came, firing as he went. No answer came after his second shot.Agnes pressed her hand over her eyes to shut out the sight, fearing to see him fall, her heart rising up to accuse her. She had forgotten to warn him! She had forgotten!Boyle’s voice roused her. There was a dry harshness in it, a hoarseness as of one who has gone long without water on the lips.“Bring that lantern here!” he commanded.She did not stand to debate it, but took up the light and hurried to the place where he stood. A man lay at his feet, his long hair tossed in disorder, his long coat spread out like a black blotch upon the ground. Boyle took the lantern and bent over the victim of his steady arm, growled in his throat, and bent lower. The man’s face was partly hidden by the rank grass in which he lay. Boyle turned it up to the light with his foot and straightened his back with a grunt of disdain.“Huh!Thatrabbit!” said he, giving her back the light.It did not require that gleam upon the white face to tell Agnes that the victim was the polemical sheep-herder, whose intention had been steadier than his aim.Boyle hesitated a moment as if to speak to her, but said nothing before he turned and walked away.“You’ve killed him!” she called after him sharply.253“Don’t go away and leave him here like this!”“He’s not dead,” said Boyle. “Don’t you hear him snort?”The man’s breathing was indeed audible, and growing louder with each labored inspiration.“Turn him over on his face,” directed Boyle. “There’s blood in his throat.”“Will you go for Smith?” she asked, kneeling beside the wounded man.“He’s coming; I can hear the sauerkraut jolt in him while he’s half a mile away. If anybody comes looking for me on account of this–coroner or–oh, anybody–I’ll be down the river about a quarter below the stage-ford. I’ll wait there a day longer to hear from you, and this is my last word.”With that Boyle left her. Smith came very shortly, having heard the shots; and the people from up the river came, and the young man from the bridal nest across on the other side. They made a wondering, awed ring around the wounded man, who was pronounced by Smith to be in deep waters. There was a bullet through his neck.Smith believed there was life enough left in the sheep-herder to last until he could fetch a doctor from Meander.“But that’s thirty miles,” said Agnes, “and Dr. Slavens is not more than twenty. You know where he’s located–down by Comanche?”Smith knew, but he had forgotten for the minute,254so accustomed to turning as he was to the center of civilization in that section for all the gentle ministrants of woe, such as doctors, preachers, and undertakers.“I’ll have him here before morning,” said Smith, posting off to get his horse.The poor sheep-herder was too sorely hurt to last the night out. Before Smith had been two hours on his way the shepherd was in the land of shades, having it out face to face with Epictetus–if he carried the memory of his contention across with him, to be sure.The neighbors arranged him respectably upon a board, and covered him over with a blanket, keeping watch beside him in the open, with the clear stars shining undisturbed by this thing which made such a turmoil in their breasts. There he lay, waiting the doctor and the coroner, and all who might come, his earthly troubles locked up forever in his cold heart, his earthly argument forever at an end.

Morning found Agnes only the more firmly determined to bear her troubles alone. Smith came by early. He looked curiously at the revolver, which she still carried at her waist, but there was approval in his eyes. The sight of the weapon seemed to cheer Smith, and make him easier in his mind about something that had given him unrest. She heard him singing as he passed on to his work. Across the river the bride was singing also, and there seemed to be a song in even the sound of the merry axes among the cottonwoods, where her neighboring settler and his two lank sons were chopping and hewing the logs for their cabin. But there was no song in her own heart, where it was needed most.

She knew that Jerry Boyle had camped somewhere near the stage-road, where he could watch her coming and going to carry the demand on Dr. Slavens which he had left with her. He would be watching the road even now, and he would watch all day, or perhaps ride up there to learn the reason when he failed to see her pass. She tied back the flaps of her tent to let the wind blow through, and to show any caller that she was not at home, then saddled her horse and rode away into the hills. It needed a day of solitude, she thought, to come234to a conclusion on the question how she was to face it out with Jerry Boyle. Whether to stay and fight the best that she was able, or to turn and fly, leaving all her hopes behind, was a matter which must be determined before night.

In pensive mood she rode on, giving her horse its head, but following a general course into the east. As her wise animal picked its way over the broken ground, she turned the situation in her mind.

There was no doubt that she had been indiscreet in the manner of taking up her homestead, but she could not drive herself to the belief that she had committed a moral crime. And the doctor. He would drop all his prospects in the land that he held if she should call on him, she well believed. He was big enough for a sacrifice like that, with never a question in his honest eyes to cloud the generosity of the act. If she had him by to advise her in this hour, and to benefit by his wisdom and courage, she sighed, how comfortable it would be.

Perhaps she should have gone, mused she, pursuing this thought, to his place, and put the thing before him in all its ugliness, with no reservations, no attempts to conceal or defend. He could have told her how far her act was punishable. Perhaps, at the most, it would mean no more than giving up the claim, which was enough, considering all that she had founded on it. Yes, she should have ridden straight to Dr. Slavens; that would have been the wiser course.235

Considering whether she would have time to go and return that day, wasted as the morning was, she pulled up her horse and looked around to see if she could estimate by her location the distance from her camp. That she had penetrated the country east of the river farther than ever before, was plain at a glance. The surroundings were new to her. There was more vegetation, and marks of recent grazing everywhere.

She mounted the hill-crest for a wider survey, and there in a little valley below her she saw a flock of sheep grazing, while farther along the ridge stood a sheep-wagon, a strange and rather disconcerting figure striding up and down beside it.

Doubtless it was the shepherd, she understood. But a queer figure he made in that place; and his actions were unusual, to say the least, in one of his sedate and melancholy calling. He was a young man, garbed in a long, black coat, tattered more or less about the skirts and open in front, displaying his red shirt. His hair was long upon his collar, and his head was bare.

As he walked up and down a short beat near his wagon, the shepherd held in his hand a book, which he placed before his eyes with a flourish now, and then with a flourish withdrew it, meantime gesticulating with his empty hand in the most extravagant fashion. His dog, sharper of perception than its master, lay aside from him a little way, its ears pricked up, its sharp nose lifted, sniffing the scent of the stranger. But it gave no alarm.236

Agnes felt that the man must be harmless, whatever his peculiarities. She rode forward, bent on asking him how far she had strayed from the river. As she drew near, she heard him muttering and declaiming, illustrating his arguments of protestation with clenched fist and tossing head, his long hair lifting from his temples in the wind.

He greeted her respectfully, without sign of perturbation or surprise, as one well accustomed to the society of people above the rank of shepherd.

“My apparent eccentric behavior at the moment when you first saw me, madam, or miss, perhaps, most likely I should say, indeed––”

Agnes nodded, smiling, to confirm his penetration.

“So, as I was saying, my behavior may have led you into doubt of my balance, and the consequent question of your safety in my vicinity,” he continued.

“Nothing of the kind, I assure you,” said she. “I thought you might be a–a divinity student by your dress, or maybe a candidate for the legal profession.”

“Neither,” he disclaimed. “I am a philosopher, and at the moment you first beheld me I was engaged in a heated controversy with Epictetus, whoseDiscoursesI hold in my hand. We are unable to agree on many points, especially upon the point which he assumes that he has made in the discussion of grief. He contends that when one is not blamable for some calamity which bereaves him or strips him of his possessions, grief is unmanly, regret inexcusable.237

“‘How?’ say I, meeting him foot to foot on the controversy, ‘in case I lose my son, my daughter, my wife–the wife of my soul and heart–shall I not grieve? shall I not be permitted the solace of a tear?’

“And Epictetus: ‘Were you to blame for the disease which cut them off? Did you light the fire which consumed them, or sink the ship which carried them down?’

“‘No,’ I answer; ‘but because I’m blameless shall I become inhuman, and close my heart to all display of tenderness and pain?’

“And there we have it, miss, over and over again. Ah, I am afraid we shall never agree!”

“It is lamentable,” Agnes agreed, believing that the young man’s life in the solitudes had unsettled his mind. “I never agree with him on that myself.”

The philosopher’s hollow, weathered face glowed as she gave this testimony. He drew a little nearer to her, shaking the long, dark, loose hair back from his forehead.

“I am glad that you don’t think me demented,” said he. “Many, who do not understand the deeper feelings of the soul, do believe it. The hollow-minded and the unstable commonly lose their small balance of reason in these hills, miss, with no companionship, month in and month out, but a dog and the poor, foolish creatures which you see in the valley yonder. But to one who is a philosopher, and a student of the higher things, this situation offers room for the expansion of238the soul. Mine has gone forth and enlarged here; it has filled the universe.”

“But a man of your education and capabilities,” she suggested, thinking to humor him, “ought to be more congenially situated, it seems to me. There must be more remunerative pursuits which you could follow?”

“Remuneration for one may not be reward for another,” he told her. “I shall remain here until my mission is accomplished.”

He turned to his flock, and, with a motion of the arm, sped his dog to fetch in some stragglers which seemed straying off waywardly over the crest of the opposite hill. As he stood so she marked his ascetic gauntness, and noted that the hand which swung at his side twitched and clenched, and that the muscles of his cleanly shaved jaws swelled as he locked his teeth in determination.

“Your mission?” she asked, curious regarding what it might be, there in the solitude of those barren hills.

“I see that you are armed,” he observed irrelevantly, as if the subject of his mission had been put aside. “I have a very modern weapon of that pattern in the wagon, but there is little call for the use of it here. Perhaps you live in the midst of greater dangers than I?”

“I’m one of the new settlers over in the river bottom,” she explained. “I rode up to ask you how far I’d strayed from home.”

“It’s about seven miles across to the river, I should estimate,” he told her. “I graze up to the boundary239of the reservation, and it’s called five miles from there.”

“Thank you; I think I’ll be going back then.”

“Will you do me the favor to look at this before you go?” he asked, drawing a folded paper from the inner pocket of his coat and handing it to her.

It was a page from one of those so-calledDirectorieswhich small grafters go about devising in small cities and out-on-the-edge communities, in which the pictures of the leading citizens are printed for a consideration. The page had been folded across the center; it was broken and worn.

“You may see the person whose portrait is presented there,” said he, “and if you should see him, you would confer a favor by letting me know.”

“Why, I saw him yesterday!” she exclaimed in surprise. “It’s Jerry Boyle!”

The sheep-herder’s eyes brightened. A glow came into his brown face.

“You do well to go armed where that wolf ranges!” said he. “You know him–you saw him yesterday. Is he still there?”

“Why, I think he’s camped somewhere along the river,” she told him, unable to read what lay behind the excitement in the man’s manner.

He folded the paper and returned it to his pocket, his breath quick upon his lips. Suddenly he laid hold of her bridle with one hand, and with the other snatched the revolver from her low-swinging holster.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said he; “but I want to know.240Tell me true–lean over and whisper in my ear. Is he your friend?”

“No, no! Far from it!” she whispered, complying with his strange order out of fear that his insanity, flaming as it was under the spur of some half-broken memory, might lead him to take her life.

He gave her back the revolver and released the horse.

“Go,” said he. “But don’t warn him, as you value your own life! My mission here is to kill that man!”

Perhaps it was a surge of unworthiness which swept her, lifting her heart like hope. The best of us is unworthy at times; the best of us is base. Selfishness is the festering root of more evil than gold. In that flash it seemed to her that Providence had raised up an arm to save her. She leaned over, her face bright with eagerness.

“Has he wronged you, too?” she asked.

He lifted his hand to his forehead slowly, as if in a gesture of pain. The blood had drained from his face; his cheek-bones were marked white through his wind-hardened skin.

“It’s not a subject to be discussed with a woman, sir,” said he absently. “There was a wife–somewhere there was a wife! This man came between us. I was not then what I am today–a shepherd on the hills.... But I must keep you here; you will betray me and warn him if I let you go!” he cried, rousing suddenly, catching her bridle again.241

“No, I’ll not warn him,” Agnes assured him.

“If I thought you would”–he hesitated, searching her face with his fevered eyes, in which red veins showed as in the eyes of an angry dog–“I’d have to sacrifice you!”

Agnes felt that she never could draw her weapon in time, in case the eccentric tried to take it away again, and her heart quailed as she measured the distance she would have to ride before the fall of the ground would protect her, even if she should manage to break his hold on the bridle, and gallop off while he was fetching his pistol from the wagon.

“I’ll not warn him,” said she, placing her hand on his arm. “I give you my sincere word that I’ll do nothing to save him from what I feel to be your just vengeance.”

“Go, before I doubt you again!” he cried, slapping her horse with his palm as he let go the bridle.

From the tip of the hill she looked back. He had disappeared–into the wagon, she supposed; and she made haste to swerve from the straight course to put another hill between them, in case he might run after her, his mad mind again aflame with the belief that she would cheat him of his revenge.

Agnes arrived in camp full of tremors and contradictory emotions. One minute she felt that she should ride and warn Boyle, guilty as he might be, and deserving of whatever punishment the hand of the wronged man might be able to inflict; the next she relieved herself242of this impulse by arguing that the insane sheep-herder was plainly the instrument of fate–she lacked the temerity, after the first flush, to credit it to Providence–lifted up to throw his troubles between her and her own.

She sat in the sun before her tent thinking it over, for and against, cooling considerably and coming to a saner judgment of the situation. Every little while she looked toward the hills, to see if the shepherd had followed her. She had seen no horse in the man’s camp; he could not possibly make it on foot, under two hours, even if he came at all, she told herself.

Perhaps it was an imaginary grievance, based upon the reputation which Boyle had earned for himself; maybe the poor, declaiming philosopher had forgotten all about it by now, and had returned to his discourses and his argument. She brewed a pot of tea, for the shadows were marking noonday, and began to consider riding down the river to find Boyle and tell him of the man’s threat, leaving him to follow his own judgment in the matter. His conscience would tell him whether to stand or fly.

Strong as her resentment was against the man who had come into her plans so unexpectedly and thrown them in a tangle, she felt that it would be wrong to her own honesty to conceal from him the knowledge of his danger. Perhaps there remained manliness enough in him to cause him to withdraw his avaricious scheme to oust Dr. Slavens in return for a service like that.243She determined at last to seek Boyle in his camp.

She brought up her horse and saddled it, took a look around camp to see that everything was in shape–for she liked to leave things tidy, in case some of the neighbors should stop in–and was about to mount, when a man’s head and shoulders appeared from behind her own cottonwood log. A glance showed her that it was the sheep-herder. His head was bare, his wild hair in his eyes.

He got to his feet, his pistol in his hand.

“I watched you,” said he, sheathing the weapon, as if he had changed his mind about the use of it. “I knew you’d go!”

“But I didn’t intend to when I parted from you up there on the hill,” she declared, greatly confused over being caught in this breach of faith with even a crazy man.

“I considered that, too,” said the philosopher. “But I watched you. I’ll never be fool enough to entirely trust a woman again. You all lie!”

She wondered how he had arrived there so quickly and silently, for he gave no evidence of fatigue or heat. She did not know the dry endurance which a life like his builds up in a man. Sheep-herders in that country are noted for their fleetness. It is a common saying of them that their heels are as light as their heads.

But there he was, at any rate, and her good intentions toward Boyle must be surrendered. Conscience had a palliative in the fact that she had meant to go.244

“Heaven knows I have as little reason to wish him well as you!” said she, speaking in low voice, as if to herself, as she began to undo the saddle girth.

“Stay here, then,” said the sheep-herder, watching her with glistening eyes. “I’ll kill him for both of us! Where is his camp?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, shuddering.

The demented shepherd’s way of speaking of taking a human life, even though a worthless one, or a vicious one, was eager and hungry. He licked his lips like a dog.

“You said he was camped on the river. Where?”

“I don’t know,” she returned again.

“I’ll tell you,” said he, staying her hand as she tugged on a strap. “Both of us will go! You shall ride, and I’ll run beside you. But”–he bent over, grinding his teeth and growling between them–“you sha’n’t help kill him! That’s for me, alone!”

She drew back from his proposal with a sudden realization of what a desperately brutal thing this unstrung creature was about to do, with a terrible arraignment of self-reproach because she had made no effort to dissuade him or place an obstacle in the way of accomplishing his design. It was not strange, thought she, with a revulsion of self-loathing, that he accepted her as a willing accomplice and proposed that she bear a hand. Even her effort to ride and find Boyle had been half-hearted. She might have gone, she told herself, before the herder arrived.245

“No, no! I couldn’t go! I couldn’t!” she cried, forgetting that she was facing an unbalanced man, all the force of pleading in her voice.

“No, you want to kill him yourself!” he charged savagely. “Give me that horse–give it to me, I tell you! I’ll go alone!”

He sprang into the saddle, not waiting to adjust the stirrups to his long legs. With his knees pushed up like a jockey’s, he rode off, the pointer of chance, or the cunning of his own inscrutable brain, directing him the way Boyle had gone the evening before.

His going left her nerveless and weak. She sat and watched him out of sight beyond the cottonwoods and willows, thinking what a terrible thing it was to ride out with the cold intention of killing a man. This man was irresponsible; the strength of his desire for revenge had overwhelmed his reason. The law would excuse him of murder, for in the dimness of his own mind there was no conception of crime.

But what excuse could there be for one who sat down in deliberation––

Base Jerry Boyle might be, ready to sacrifice unfeelingly the innocent for his own pleasure and gain, ready to strike at their dearest hopes, ready to trample under his feet the green gardens of their hearts’ desire; yet, who should sit in judgment on him, or seek a justification in his deeds to–to–– Even then she could not bring her thoughts to express it, although her wild heart had sung over it less than twenty-four hours before.246

A shiver of sickness turned her cold. With quick, nervous fingers she unbuckled the belt which held her revolver and cartridges; she carried the weapon into the tent and flung it to the ground.

At dusk the sheep-herder returned, with the horse much blown.

“He had been there, but he’s gone,” he announced. “I followed him eastward along the stage-road, but lost his trail.”

He dismounted and dropped the reins to the ground. Agnes set about to relieve the tired animal of the burden of the saddle, the sheep-herder offering no assistance. He stood with his head bent, an air of dejection and melancholy over him, a cloud upon his face. Presently he walked away, saying no more. She watched him as he went, moodily and unheeding of his way, until he passed out of view around a thicket of tangled shrubs which grew upon the river-bank.

While her horse was relieving his weariness in contented sighs over his oats, Agnes made a fire and started her evening coffee. She had a feeling of cleanness in her conscience, and a lightness of heart which she knew never could have been her own to enjoy again if the crazed herder had come back with blood upon his hands.

There was no question about the feeling of loneliness that settled down upon her with aching intensity when she sat down to her meal, spread on a box, the lantern a yellow speck in the boundless night. A rod247away its poor, futile glimmer against such mighty odds was understood, standing there with no encompassing walls to mark the boundary of its field. It was like the struggle of a man who stands alone in the vastness of life with no definite aim to circumscribe his endeavor, wasting his feeble illumination upon a little rod of earth.

We must have walls around us, both lanterns and men, rightly to fill the sphere of our designed usefulness; walls to restrain our wastrel forces; walls to bind our lustful desires, our foolish ambitions, our outwinging flights. Yet, in its way, the lantern served nobly, as many a man serves in the circle which binds his small adventures, and beyond which his fame can never pass.

From the door of her tent Agnes looked out upon the lantern, comparing herself with it, put down there as she was in that blank land, which was still in the night of its development. Over that place, which she had chosen to make a home and a refuge, her own weak flame would fall dimly, perhaps never able to light it all. Would it be worth the struggle, the heart-hunger for other places and things, the years of waiting, the toil and loneliness?

She went back to her supper, the cup which she had gone to fetch in her hand. The strength of night made her heart timid; the touch of food was dry and tasteless upon her lips. For the first time since coming to that country she felt the pain of discouragement.248What could she do against such a great, rough thing? Would it ever be worth the labor it would cost?

Feeble as her light was against the night, it was enough to discover tears upon her cheeks as she sat there upon the ground. Her fair hair lay dark in the shadows, and light with that contrast which painters love, where it lifted in airy rise above her brow. And there were the pensive softness of her chin, the sweep of her round throat, the profile as sharp as a shadow against the mellow glow. Perhaps the lantern was content in its circumscribed endeavor against the night, when it could light to such good advantage so much loveliness.

“If I’d have put my hands over your eyes, who would you have named?” asked a voice near her ear, a voice familiar, and fitted in that moment with old associations.

“I’d have had no trouble in guessing, Jerry, for I was expecting you,” she answered, scarcely turning her head, although his silent manner of approach had startled her.

“Agnes, I don’t believe you’ve got any more nerves than an Indian,” he said, dropping down beside her.

“If one wanted to make a facetious rejoinder, the opening is excellent,” she said, fighting back her nervousness with a smile. “Will you have some supper?”

“I’d like it, if you don’t mind.”249

She busied herself with the stove, but he peremptorily took away from her the office of feeding the fire, and watched her as she put bacon on to fry.

“Agnes, you ought to have been frying bacon for me these four years past–figuratively, I mean,” he remarked, musingly.

“If you don’t mind, we’ll not go back to that,” she said.

Boyle made no mention of the purpose of his visit. He made his supper with ambassadorial avoidance of the subject which lay so uneasily on her mind. When he had finished, he drew out his tobacco-sack and rolled a cigarette, and, as it dangled from his lip by a shred of its wrapping, he turned to her.

“Well?” he asked.

She was standing near the lantern, removing the few utensils–the bacon had been served to him in the pan–from her outdoor table. When she answered him she turned away until her face was hidden in the shadow.

“I didn’t carry your message to Dr. Slavens as you ordered, Jerry.”

“I know it,” said he. “What next?”

“I guess it’s ‘up to you,’ as you put it. I’m not going to try to save myself at the expense of any of my friends.”

Boyle got up. He took a little turn away from the box whereon the lantern stood, as if struggling to maintain the fair front he had worn when he appeared.250After a little he turned and faced her, walking back slowly until only the length of the little stove was between them.

“Have you considered your own danger?” he asked.

“It wouldn’t help you a great deal here, among these rough, fair-minded people, to take an advantage like that of a woman, especially when her transgression is merely technical and not intentional,” she rejoined.

“I wouldn’t have to appear in it,” he assured her.

“Well, set the United States marshal after me as soon as you want to; I’ll be here,” she said, speaking with the even tone of resignation which one commands when the mind has arrived at a determined stand to face the last and worst.

“Agnes, I told you yesterday that I was all over the old feeling that I had for you.”

Boyle leaned forward as he spoke, his voice earnest and low.

“But that was a bluff. I’m just as big a fool as I ever was about it. If you want to walk over me, go ahead; if you want to–oh, rats! But I’ll tell you; if you’ll come away with me I’ll drop all of this. I’ll leave that tin-horn doctor where he is, and let him make what he can out of his claim.”

“I couldn’t marry you, Jerry; it’s impossible to think of that,” she told him gently.

“Oh, well, that’s a formality,” he returned, far more in his voice than his words. “I’ll say to you––”

“You’ve said too much!” she stopped him, feeling251her cheeks burn under the outrage which he had offered to her chaste heart. “There’s no room for any more words between you and me–never! Go now–say no more!”

She walked across the bright ring of light toward the tent, making a little detour around him, as if afraid that his violent words might be followed by violent deeds.

Boyle turned where he stood, following her with his eyes. The light of the lantern struck him strongly up to the waist, leaving his head and shoulders in the gloom above its glare. His hands were in the pockets of his trousers, his shoulders drooping forward in that horseback stoop which years in the saddle had fastened on him.

Agnes had reached the tent, where she stood with her hand on the flap, turning a hasty look behind her, when a shot out of the dark from the direction of the river-bank struck her ears with a suddenness and a portent which seemed to carry the pain of death. She was facing that way; she saw the flash of it; she saw Jerry Boyle leap with lithe agility, as if springing from the scourge of flames, and sling his pistol from the hostler under his coat.

In his movement there was an admirable quickness, rising almost to the dignity of beauty in the rapidity with which he adjusted himself to meet this sudden exigency. In half the beat of a heart, it seemed, he had fired. Out of the dark came another leap of flame,252another report. Boyle walked directly toward the point from which it came, firing as he went. No answer came after his second shot.

Agnes pressed her hand over her eyes to shut out the sight, fearing to see him fall, her heart rising up to accuse her. She had forgotten to warn him! She had forgotten!

Boyle’s voice roused her. There was a dry harshness in it, a hoarseness as of one who has gone long without water on the lips.

“Bring that lantern here!” he commanded.

She did not stand to debate it, but took up the light and hurried to the place where he stood. A man lay at his feet, his long hair tossed in disorder, his long coat spread out like a black blotch upon the ground. Boyle took the lantern and bent over the victim of his steady arm, growled in his throat, and bent lower. The man’s face was partly hidden by the rank grass in which he lay. Boyle turned it up to the light with his foot and straightened his back with a grunt of disdain.

“Huh!Thatrabbit!” said he, giving her back the light.

It did not require that gleam upon the white face to tell Agnes that the victim was the polemical sheep-herder, whose intention had been steadier than his aim.

Boyle hesitated a moment as if to speak to her, but said nothing before he turned and walked away.

“You’ve killed him!” she called after him sharply.253“Don’t go away and leave him here like this!”

“He’s not dead,” said Boyle. “Don’t you hear him snort?”

The man’s breathing was indeed audible, and growing louder with each labored inspiration.

“Turn him over on his face,” directed Boyle. “There’s blood in his throat.”

“Will you go for Smith?” she asked, kneeling beside the wounded man.

“He’s coming; I can hear the sauerkraut jolt in him while he’s half a mile away. If anybody comes looking for me on account of this–coroner or–oh, anybody–I’ll be down the river about a quarter below the stage-ford. I’ll wait there a day longer to hear from you, and this is my last word.”

With that Boyle left her. Smith came very shortly, having heard the shots; and the people from up the river came, and the young man from the bridal nest across on the other side. They made a wondering, awed ring around the wounded man, who was pronounced by Smith to be in deep waters. There was a bullet through his neck.

Smith believed there was life enough left in the sheep-herder to last until he could fetch a doctor from Meander.

“But that’s thirty miles,” said Agnes, “and Dr. Slavens is not more than twenty. You know where he’s located–down by Comanche?”

Smith knew, but he had forgotten for the minute,254so accustomed to turning as he was to the center of civilization in that section for all the gentle ministrants of woe, such as doctors, preachers, and undertakers.

“I’ll have him here before morning,” said Smith, posting off to get his horse.

The poor sheep-herder was too sorely hurt to last the night out. Before Smith had been two hours on his way the shepherd was in the land of shades, having it out face to face with Epictetus–if he carried the memory of his contention across with him, to be sure.

The neighbors arranged him respectably upon a board, and covered him over with a blanket, keeping watch beside him in the open, with the clear stars shining undisturbed by this thing which made such a turmoil in their breasts. There he lay, waiting the doctor and the coroner, and all who might come, his earthly troubles locked up forever in his cold heart, his earthly argument forever at an end.

255CHAPTER XVIA PROMISE

Dr. Slavens rode in before dawn, more concerned about Agnes than about the person in whose behalf he had been summoned. On the way he asked Smith repeatedly how the tragedy affected her; whether she was frightened or greatly disturbed.“She’s as steady as a compass,” said Smith; and so he found her.Somewhat too steady, in fact. It was the steadiness of a deep and settled melancholy, through which his best efforts could do no more than strike a feeble, weary smile.Immediately upon the death of the herder, one of the men had ridden to Meander and carried word to the coroner. That official arrived in the middle of the forenoon, bringing with him the undertaker and a wagon. After some perfunctory inquiries, the coroner concluded that an inquest was not necessary. He did not go to the trouble to find Boyle and question him, but he looked with a familiar understanding in his piggish eyes at Agnes when she related the circumstances of the tragedy.Coroners, and others who knew the Governor’s son, had but one measure for a woman who entertained Jerry Boyle alone in her tent, or even outside it, at256night. Boyle’s associations had set the standard of his own morality, as well as that of his consorts. The woman from up the river, and the little bride from across the ford, drew off together, whispering, after Agnes had told her story. Presently they slipped away without a word.Even Dr. Slavens, cool and just-minded as he was, felt the hot stirring of jealous suspicion. It brought to his mind unpleasantly the ruminations of his solitary days in camp among the rocks, when he had turned over in his mind the belief that there was something of the past between Agnes and Boyle.He had not convicted her in his own judgment of any wrong, for the sincerity of her eyes had stood between him and the possibility of any such conclusion. Now the thought that, after all his trust, she might be unworthy, smote painfully upon his heart.When the others had gone away, after a little standing around, hitch-legged and wise, in close discussion of the event, the doctor sitting, meantime, with Agnes in front of the tent, he spoke of the necessity of getting back to his claim. She was pale after the night’s strain, although apparently unconscious of the obloquy of her neighbors. Nevertheless, she pressed him to remain for the midday meal.“I’ve not been very hospitable, I’m afraid,” said she; “but this thing has stunned me. It seems like it has taken something away from the prospect of life here.”257“Yes, it has taken something away,” he responded, gravely thoughtful, his look bent upon the ground.She sprang up quickly, a sharp little cry upon her lips as if from the shock of a blow from a hand beloved.“I saw it in their eyes!” she cried. “But you–but you! Oh–oh–Itrustedyou to know!”“Forgive me,” he begged. “I did not mean to hurt you. Perhaps I was thinking of the romance and the glamour which this had stripped away from things here. I think my mind was running on that.”“No,” she denied. “You were thinking like that little woman across the river with the fright and horror in her big eyes. You were thinking that I am guilty, and that there can be but one answer to the presence of that man in my camp last night. His notorious name goes before him like a blight.”“You’ll have to move your camp now,” as if seeking delicately to avoid the ghost that seemed to have risen between them; “this place will have unpleasant associations.”“Yes; it cannot be reconsecrated and purified.”He stood as if prepared to leave. Agnes placed her hand upon his shoulder, looking with grieved eyes into his face.“Will you stay a little while,” she asked, “and hear me? I want to part from you with your friendship and respect, for I am entitled to both, I am worthy of both–if ever.”258“Let me move your stool out into the sun,” he suggested. “There’s a chill in the wind today. Of course I’ll stay, and we’ll have some more of that excellent coffee before I go. You must teach me how you make it; mine always turns out as muddy as a bucket of Missouri River water.”His cheerfulness was like that which a healthy man displays at the bedside of a dying friend–assumed, but helpful in its way. He placed her folding canvas stool in the sun beyond the shadow of the tent and found a box for himself. Thus arranged, he waited for her to speak.“Still, I am not sure of what I protested in regard to your friendship and respect,” said she after a little brooding silence. “I am a fraud, taken at the best, and perhaps a criminal.”Dr. Slavens studied her face as she paused there and looked away, as if her thoughts concentrated beyond the blue hills in the west.“My name is not Horton,” she resumed, facing him suddenly. “It is Gates, and my father is in the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.”“But there was no call for you to tell me this,” he protested softly.“Yes, every reason for it,” she averred. “The fabric of all my troubles rests on that. He was president of a bank–you remember the scandal, don’t you? It was nation-wide.”He nodded.259“I spoke to you once of the ghosts of money. They have worried me for four years and more, for nothing but the ghosts are left when one loses place and consequence before the world. It was a national bank, and the charge was misapplication of funds. He had money enough for all the sane uses of any man, but the pernicious ambition to be greater assailed him, even old as he was.“He never said, and I never have held it so, that his punishment was unjust. Only it seemed to us unfair when so many greater evildoers escape or receive pardons. You will remember, perhaps, that none of the depositors lost anything. Wild as his schemes appeared, they turned out sound enough after a while, and everything was liquidated.“We gave up everything of our own; mother and I have felt the rub of hardship before today. The hardest of all was the falling away of those whom we believed to be friends. We learned that the favors of society are as fickle as those of fortune, and that they walk hand in hand.“No matter. Father’s term will expire in less than one month. He is an old, broken, disgraced man; he never will be able to lift up his face before the world again. That is why I am here. Mother and I concluded that we might make a refuge for him here, where he would be unknown. We planned for him to leave his name, and as much of his past as he could shake off, behind him at the prison door.260“It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old life was gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a felon’s daughter; but, worse than that–I was poor! This country held out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul.”The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl’s hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame.“There is that freedom about it,” said he, “when one sees it by day and sunlight.”“But it has its nights, too,” she shuddered, the shadow of last night in her eyes.“Yet they all pass–the longest of them and the most painful,” he comforted her.“And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of Horton, which is a family name on mother’s side, not thinking what the consequence might be. Now, in payment for this first breach of the law, I must at least give up all my schemes here and retreat. I may be prosecuted; I may even go to prison, like my father did.”261“Surely not!” he protested. “Who is there to know it, to lay a charge against you?”“Such person is not wanting in the miserable plot of my life,” she answered. “I will reach him soon in my sorry tale.”“Boyle!” Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. “He’s the man!”“You take the name from my mouth,” she told him. “He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty.”“It might be so here,” he admitted.“I met Jerry Boyle about five years ago, when father was in Congress. His father was at that time Senator from this state. We lived in Washington, and Jerry Boyle was then considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coarseness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He passed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a butterfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I–I am afraid that I encouraged him to do it at first.“But he drank and gambled, and got into brawls. He stabbed an attaché of the Mexican Legation over a woman, and the engagement to marry him which I had entered into was broken. I was foolish in the first instance, but I plead the mitigation of frivolity and262youth. My heart was not in it. I beg you to believe, Dr. Slavens, that my heart was not in it at all.”She looked at him with pleading sincerity, and from her eyes his heart gathered its recesses full of joy.“I need no further assurance of that,” he smiled.“You are generous. It was on the afternoon of the day that followed your disappearance from Comanche that Boyle came into camp there. I had not forgotten him, of course, nor his influential position in this state; but I never thought of meeting him there. It was a sickening shock to me. I denied his protestations of acquaintanceship, but it passed off poorly with all of them who were present, except William Bentley, generous gentleman that he is.”“He is so,” testified Slavens.“I left Comanche because I was afraid of him, but he rode post the night that I engaged passage and beat me to Meander; but he wasn’t hurrying on my account, as you know. He tried to see me there in Meander, but I refused to meet him. The day before yesterday he came here and solicited my help in carrying out a scheme. I refused. He threatened me with exposure and arrest on account of false entry and affidavit.”Agnes told then of her ride into the hills, the meeting with the herder, and subsequent events up to the shooting. But she said nothing of Boyle’s base proposal to her, although her face burned at the recollection, giving Slavens more than half a guess what was behind that virtuous flame.263“And so, you poor little soul, all your plans for your City of Refuge are shattered because you refuse to sacrifice somebody to keep them whole,” said he.“No matter,” she returned in that voice of abnegation which only a long marching line of misfortunes can give a woman or a man command over. “I have decided, anyway, to give it up. It’s too big and rough and lonesome for me.”“And that person whom you put up your heart and soul to shield,” he went on, looking steadily into her face and pursuing his former thought, “has something in his possession which this man Boyle covets and thinks he must have? And the cheapest and easiest way to get it is to make you pay for it in the violation of your honest principles, if he can drive you to it in his skulking way?”She bowed assent, her lips tightly set.“Yes,” said he. “Just so. Well, why didn’t Boyle come to me with his threats, the coward!”“No, no!” she cried in quick fright. “Not that; it is something–something else.”“You poor dissembler!” he laughed. “You couldn’t be dishonest if you wanted to the worst way in the world. Well, don’t you worry; I’ll take it up with him today.”“You’llnotgive it up!” she exclaimed vehemently. “All your hopes are there, and it’s yours, andyou’ll notgive it up!”“Never mind,” he soothed, again taking her hand,264which she had withdrawn to aid in emphasizing her protest. “I don’t believe he’d carry out his threats about the United States marshal and all that.”“You’ll not give it up to him unless he pays you for it,” she reiterated, ignoring her own prospect of trouble. “It’s valuable, or he wouldn’t be so anxious to get it.”“Perhaps,” Slavens assented.“I’m going to leave here,” she hurriedly pursued. “It was foolish of me to come, in the first place. The vastness of it bewildered me, and ‘the lonesomeness,’ as Smith calls it, is settling in my heart.”“Well, where will you go?” he asked bewilderedly.“Somewhere–to some village or little farm, where we can raise poultry, mother and I.”“But I haven’t planned it that way,” Slavens smiled. “If you leave, what am I going to do?”“I don’t know,” she acknowledged, “unless–unless you come some time.”“Look here, Agnes,” said he, taking the matter entirely in hand. “When we leave this place, we’ll leave together. I’ve arranged that all in my mind and intention. It’s all disposed of and settled. Here comes Boyle now, I think.”Boyle left his horse standing a few rods distant and came over to where they sat.“You look comfortable,” he commented, as serene and unperturbed as if the load of one more human life on his soul were a matter too light to be felt with inconvenience.265“Very comfortable,” answered Slavens, rising stiffly. “We have nothing on our hands that common water will not wash off.”“Oh, that nut!” depreciated Boyle. “He’d talked around for a year or two about getting me. I only beat him to it when he tried; that’s all.”“But there was another occasion–another attempt that didn’t turn out quite like you intended,” said Slavens. “Do you remember me?”“Yes; you’re the tin-horn doctor that held a man up in Comanche and stole the coat off of his back,” Boyle retorted with easy insolence.Agnes looked at the doctor imploringly, plainly begging him not to provoke Boyle to another outbreak of violence. She was standing beside him, the fear and loathing which Boyle’s presence aroused undisguised in her frank face.“It was an outrage against one of the honest men who tried to murder me,” said the doctor. “But, vicious as it was, neither Shanklin nor you, his side-partner, has ever made a squeal. If it was a holdup, why haven’t you sent one of your little sheriffs out after me?”“I’m no partner of Hun Shanklin’s!” denied Boyle.“Maybe you’ve parted company since the night you slugged me and nailed me up in that box for the river to hide your work.”“I’ll make you prove that charge!” threatened Boyle hotly.266“I can’t prove it,” admitted the doctor. “If I could, I’d have you in court tomorrow. But you were one of them, and I want you to understand fully that I know it, and will treat you accordingly in any private dealings that may come up between you and me.”“If you keep spoutin’ it around that I ever slugged you, I’ll pull you into court and make you prove it! It’ll either be put up or shut up with you, mister!”“Whenever you’re ready,” invited Slavens.With somewhat more of ostentation than the simple act seemed to warrant, Boyle unbuttoned his coat, displaying his revolver as he made an exploration of his vest-pockets for a match to light his cigarette.“Well, I guess you know what I’m here for?” Boyle suggested, passing his glance significantly from one to the other of them.“Dr. Slavens is acquainted with your proposal,” said Agnes; “and it ought to be needless for me to say that I’ll not permit him to make any concession to shield myself.”“Fine! fine!” said Boyle in mock applause, throwing his head back and snorting smoke.“In the first place,” said Slavens, “your bluff don’t go. Miss Gates has not broken any law in registering and entering this land under analias. There’s no crime in assuming a name, and no felony in acquiring property under it, unless fraud is used. She has defrauded nobody, and you could not make a case against her in a thousand years!”267“I can get an indictment–that’s a cinch!” declared Boyle.“Go ahead,” said the doctor. “We’ve got some new blood in this country now, and we can find a jury that you don’t own and control when it comes to trial.”“And after the indictment comes arrest and jail,” Boyle continued, overlooking the doctor’s argument in the lofty security of his position. “It would make a lot of noisy talk, considering the family reputation and all that.”“And the outcome of it might be–and I doubt even that–that Miss Gates would lose her homestead,” Slavens supplied.“You don’t know the Federal judge in this district,” Boyle grinned. “Jail’s what it means, and plenty of it, for the judge has to approve a bond, if you know what that means.”“Why don’t you pay Dr. Slavens for his homestead, as you were ready to pay that man Peterson if you could have filed him on it?” Agnes asked.“Because it’s mine already,” said Boyle. “This man stole the description of that land, as I have told you before, at the point of a gun.”“Then you lied!” Slavens calmly charged.Boyle hitched his hip, throwing the handle of his pistol into sight.“You can say that,” said he, “because I’ve got to have your name on a paper.”“I’ll never permit Dr. Slavens to sign away his268valuable claim to you,” declared Agnes. “I’ll not allow––”Slavens lifted his hand for silence.“I’ll do the talking for this family from now on,” said he, smiling reassuringly as he held her eyes a moment with his own.He turned abruptly to Boyle.“And the fighting, too, when necessary. You keep that little gun in its place when you’re around me, young man, or you’ll get hurt! One more break like that to show me that you’ve got it, and you and I will mix. Just put that down in your book.”“Oh, all right, pardner!” returned Boyle with that jerky insolence which men of his kind assume when they realize that they have been called, and called hard. He buttoned his coat.“And as far as Miss Gates is concerned, consider her out of this case,” said Slavens. “But I want to have some private talk with you.”They walked over to the place where Boyle’s horse stood, and there, out of the hearing of Agnes, Slavens sounded Jerry sharply on his intentions. It was plain that there was no bluff in Boyle; he meant what he threatened, and he was small enough to carry it through.As an illustration of his far-reaching influence, Boyle pointed out to Slavens that nobody had approached the physician with an offer to buy him out, although one had appeared anxious enough to open negotiations the day he filed.269“When we tell a man to lay down in this part of the country, he lays down,” said Boyle; “and when we order him to walk on his hind legs, he walks. Nobody will offer you any money for that place; it isn’t worth anything to a soul on earth but me. You couldn’t sell out in a century. You’ll get that through your nut if you hang around here long enough.”For a little while Slavens thought it over, walking away a few paces and appraising the situation studiously. Suddenly he wheeled and confronted Boyle, leveling his finger at his face.“Your bluff don’t go, Boyle!” said he. “You’d just as well get on your horse and light out; and if you want to bring it to a fight, then let it be a fight. We’ll meet you on any ground you pick.”“You’re a fool!” snarled Boyle.“Then I’ll be a bigger one–big enough to call you to account before another day has passed over your head for your part in that dirty work in Comanche that night. And I want to lay it off to you right now that all the influence you can command in this state isn’t going to save you when I go after you!”Boyle picked up his bridle-reins and threaded his arm through them, standing so, legs wide apart, while he rolled a cigarette. As it dangled between his lips and the smoke of it rose up, veiling his eyes, he peered narrowly through it at the doctor.“There’s a man in the graveyard up at Cheyenne that made a talk like that one time,” he said.270“I’ll have to take your word for that,” returned Slavens, quite unmoved. “I’ll meet you at the hotel in Meander tomorrow morning at nine o’clock for a settlement, one way or the other.”“One way or the other,” repeated Boyle.He mounted his horse and rode away toward Meander, trailing a thin line of smoke behind him.Agnes hurried forward to meet Slavens as he turned toward her. Her face was bloodless, her bosom agitated.“I heard part of what you said,” she told him. “Surely you don’t mean to go over there and fight him on his own ground, among his friends?”“I’m going over there to see the county attorney,” said he. “He’s from Kansas, and a pretty straight sort of chap, it seemed to me from what I saw of him. I’m going to put this situation of ours before him, citing a hypothetical case, and get his advice. I don’t believe that there’s a shred of a case against you, and I doubt whether Boyle can bluff the government officials into making a move in it, even with all his influence.”“And you’ll come back here and tell me what he says, no matter what his opinion may be, before you act one way or another?”“If you wish it, although–Well, yes–if you wish it.”“I do, most earnestly,” she assured him.“You need a good sleep,” he counseled. “Turn in as soon as I’m gone, and don’t worry about this.271There’s a good deal of bluff in Boyle.”“He’s treacherous, and he shoots wonderfully. He killed that poor fellow last night without ever seeing him at all.”“But I’m not going to take a shot at him out of the dark,” said he.“I know. But I’ll be uneasy until you return.”“There’s too much trouble in your face today for one of your years,” he said, lifting her chin with rather a professional rebuke in his eyes. “You’ll have to put it down, or it will make you old. Go right on dreaming and planning; things will come out exactly as you have designed.”“Perhaps,” she agreed, but with little hope in her voice.Slavens saddled his horse after they had refreshed themselves with coffee. Agnes stood by, racked with an anxiety which seemed to grind her heart. The physician thought of the pioneer women of his youth, of those who lived far out on the thin edge of prairie reaches, and in the gloom of forests which groaned around them in the lone winds of winter nights. There was the same melancholy of isolation in Agnes’ eyes today as he had seen in theirs; the same sad hopelessness; the same hunger, and the longing to fly from the wilderness and its hardships, heart-weariness, and pain.Her hand lay appealingly upon his shoulder for a moment before he mounted, and her face was turned up to him, unspoken yearning on her lips.272“Promise me again before you go that you will come back here before you relinquish your homestead to Boyle,” she demanded. “Promise me that, no matter what the lawyer’s opinion may be, you’ll return here before you do anything else at all.”“I promise you,” said he.When he had ridden a little way he halted his horse and turned in his saddle to look back. She was sitting there in the sun, her head bowed, her hands clasped over her face, as if she wept or prayed. A little while he waited there, as if meditating a return, as if he had forgotten something–some solace, perhaps, for which her lips had appealed to his heart dumbly.Yet a sincere man seldom knows these things, which a trifler is so quick to see. He did not know, perhaps; or perhaps he was not certain enough to turn his horse and ride back to repair his omission. Presently he rode on slowly, his head bent, the bridle-reins loose in his hand.

Dr. Slavens rode in before dawn, more concerned about Agnes than about the person in whose behalf he had been summoned. On the way he asked Smith repeatedly how the tragedy affected her; whether she was frightened or greatly disturbed.

“She’s as steady as a compass,” said Smith; and so he found her.

Somewhat too steady, in fact. It was the steadiness of a deep and settled melancholy, through which his best efforts could do no more than strike a feeble, weary smile.

Immediately upon the death of the herder, one of the men had ridden to Meander and carried word to the coroner. That official arrived in the middle of the forenoon, bringing with him the undertaker and a wagon. After some perfunctory inquiries, the coroner concluded that an inquest was not necessary. He did not go to the trouble to find Boyle and question him, but he looked with a familiar understanding in his piggish eyes at Agnes when she related the circumstances of the tragedy.

Coroners, and others who knew the Governor’s son, had but one measure for a woman who entertained Jerry Boyle alone in her tent, or even outside it, at256night. Boyle’s associations had set the standard of his own morality, as well as that of his consorts. The woman from up the river, and the little bride from across the ford, drew off together, whispering, after Agnes had told her story. Presently they slipped away without a word.

Even Dr. Slavens, cool and just-minded as he was, felt the hot stirring of jealous suspicion. It brought to his mind unpleasantly the ruminations of his solitary days in camp among the rocks, when he had turned over in his mind the belief that there was something of the past between Agnes and Boyle.

He had not convicted her in his own judgment of any wrong, for the sincerity of her eyes had stood between him and the possibility of any such conclusion. Now the thought that, after all his trust, she might be unworthy, smote painfully upon his heart.

When the others had gone away, after a little standing around, hitch-legged and wise, in close discussion of the event, the doctor sitting, meantime, with Agnes in front of the tent, he spoke of the necessity of getting back to his claim. She was pale after the night’s strain, although apparently unconscious of the obloquy of her neighbors. Nevertheless, she pressed him to remain for the midday meal.

“I’ve not been very hospitable, I’m afraid,” said she; “but this thing has stunned me. It seems like it has taken something away from the prospect of life here.”257

“Yes, it has taken something away,” he responded, gravely thoughtful, his look bent upon the ground.

She sprang up quickly, a sharp little cry upon her lips as if from the shock of a blow from a hand beloved.

“I saw it in their eyes!” she cried. “But you–but you! Oh–oh–Itrustedyou to know!”

“Forgive me,” he begged. “I did not mean to hurt you. Perhaps I was thinking of the romance and the glamour which this had stripped away from things here. I think my mind was running on that.”

“No,” she denied. “You were thinking like that little woman across the river with the fright and horror in her big eyes. You were thinking that I am guilty, and that there can be but one answer to the presence of that man in my camp last night. His notorious name goes before him like a blight.”

“You’ll have to move your camp now,” as if seeking delicately to avoid the ghost that seemed to have risen between them; “this place will have unpleasant associations.”

“Yes; it cannot be reconsecrated and purified.”

He stood as if prepared to leave. Agnes placed her hand upon his shoulder, looking with grieved eyes into his face.

“Will you stay a little while,” she asked, “and hear me? I want to part from you with your friendship and respect, for I am entitled to both, I am worthy of both–if ever.”258

“Let me move your stool out into the sun,” he suggested. “There’s a chill in the wind today. Of course I’ll stay, and we’ll have some more of that excellent coffee before I go. You must teach me how you make it; mine always turns out as muddy as a bucket of Missouri River water.”

His cheerfulness was like that which a healthy man displays at the bedside of a dying friend–assumed, but helpful in its way. He placed her folding canvas stool in the sun beyond the shadow of the tent and found a box for himself. Thus arranged, he waited for her to speak.

“Still, I am not sure of what I protested in regard to your friendship and respect,” said she after a little brooding silence. “I am a fraud, taken at the best, and perhaps a criminal.”

Dr. Slavens studied her face as she paused there and looked away, as if her thoughts concentrated beyond the blue hills in the west.

“My name is not Horton,” she resumed, facing him suddenly. “It is Gates, and my father is in the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.”

“But there was no call for you to tell me this,” he protested softly.

“Yes, every reason for it,” she averred. “The fabric of all my troubles rests on that. He was president of a bank–you remember the scandal, don’t you? It was nation-wide.”

He nodded.259

“I spoke to you once of the ghosts of money. They have worried me for four years and more, for nothing but the ghosts are left when one loses place and consequence before the world. It was a national bank, and the charge was misapplication of funds. He had money enough for all the sane uses of any man, but the pernicious ambition to be greater assailed him, even old as he was.

“He never said, and I never have held it so, that his punishment was unjust. Only it seemed to us unfair when so many greater evildoers escape or receive pardons. You will remember, perhaps, that none of the depositors lost anything. Wild as his schemes appeared, they turned out sound enough after a while, and everything was liquidated.

“We gave up everything of our own; mother and I have felt the rub of hardship before today. The hardest of all was the falling away of those whom we believed to be friends. We learned that the favors of society are as fickle as those of fortune, and that they walk hand in hand.

“No matter. Father’s term will expire in less than one month. He is an old, broken, disgraced man; he never will be able to lift up his face before the world again. That is why I am here. Mother and I concluded that we might make a refuge for him here, where he would be unknown. We planned for him to leave his name, and as much of his past as he could shake off, behind him at the prison door.260

“It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old life was gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a felon’s daughter; but, worse than that–I was poor! This country held out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul.”

The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl’s hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame.

“There is that freedom about it,” said he, “when one sees it by day and sunlight.”

“But it has its nights, too,” she shuddered, the shadow of last night in her eyes.

“Yet they all pass–the longest of them and the most painful,” he comforted her.

“And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of Horton, which is a family name on mother’s side, not thinking what the consequence might be. Now, in payment for this first breach of the law, I must at least give up all my schemes here and retreat. I may be prosecuted; I may even go to prison, like my father did.”261

“Surely not!” he protested. “Who is there to know it, to lay a charge against you?”

“Such person is not wanting in the miserable plot of my life,” she answered. “I will reach him soon in my sorry tale.”

“Boyle!” Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. “He’s the man!”

“You take the name from my mouth,” she told him. “He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty.”

“It might be so here,” he admitted.

“I met Jerry Boyle about five years ago, when father was in Congress. His father was at that time Senator from this state. We lived in Washington, and Jerry Boyle was then considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coarseness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He passed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a butterfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I–I am afraid that I encouraged him to do it at first.

“But he drank and gambled, and got into brawls. He stabbed an attaché of the Mexican Legation over a woman, and the engagement to marry him which I had entered into was broken. I was foolish in the first instance, but I plead the mitigation of frivolity and262youth. My heart was not in it. I beg you to believe, Dr. Slavens, that my heart was not in it at all.”

She looked at him with pleading sincerity, and from her eyes his heart gathered its recesses full of joy.

“I need no further assurance of that,” he smiled.

“You are generous. It was on the afternoon of the day that followed your disappearance from Comanche that Boyle came into camp there. I had not forgotten him, of course, nor his influential position in this state; but I never thought of meeting him there. It was a sickening shock to me. I denied his protestations of acquaintanceship, but it passed off poorly with all of them who were present, except William Bentley, generous gentleman that he is.”

“He is so,” testified Slavens.

“I left Comanche because I was afraid of him, but he rode post the night that I engaged passage and beat me to Meander; but he wasn’t hurrying on my account, as you know. He tried to see me there in Meander, but I refused to meet him. The day before yesterday he came here and solicited my help in carrying out a scheme. I refused. He threatened me with exposure and arrest on account of false entry and affidavit.”

Agnes told then of her ride into the hills, the meeting with the herder, and subsequent events up to the shooting. But she said nothing of Boyle’s base proposal to her, although her face burned at the recollection, giving Slavens more than half a guess what was behind that virtuous flame.263

“And so, you poor little soul, all your plans for your City of Refuge are shattered because you refuse to sacrifice somebody to keep them whole,” said he.

“No matter,” she returned in that voice of abnegation which only a long marching line of misfortunes can give a woman or a man command over. “I have decided, anyway, to give it up. It’s too big and rough and lonesome for me.”

“And that person whom you put up your heart and soul to shield,” he went on, looking steadily into her face and pursuing his former thought, “has something in his possession which this man Boyle covets and thinks he must have? And the cheapest and easiest way to get it is to make you pay for it in the violation of your honest principles, if he can drive you to it in his skulking way?”

She bowed assent, her lips tightly set.

“Yes,” said he. “Just so. Well, why didn’t Boyle come to me with his threats, the coward!”

“No, no!” she cried in quick fright. “Not that; it is something–something else.”

“You poor dissembler!” he laughed. “You couldn’t be dishonest if you wanted to the worst way in the world. Well, don’t you worry; I’ll take it up with him today.”

“You’llnotgive it up!” she exclaimed vehemently. “All your hopes are there, and it’s yours, andyou’ll notgive it up!”

“Never mind,” he soothed, again taking her hand,264which she had withdrawn to aid in emphasizing her protest. “I don’t believe he’d carry out his threats about the United States marshal and all that.”

“You’ll not give it up to him unless he pays you for it,” she reiterated, ignoring her own prospect of trouble. “It’s valuable, or he wouldn’t be so anxious to get it.”

“Perhaps,” Slavens assented.

“I’m going to leave here,” she hurriedly pursued. “It was foolish of me to come, in the first place. The vastness of it bewildered me, and ‘the lonesomeness,’ as Smith calls it, is settling in my heart.”

“Well, where will you go?” he asked bewilderedly.

“Somewhere–to some village or little farm, where we can raise poultry, mother and I.”

“But I haven’t planned it that way,” Slavens smiled. “If you leave, what am I going to do?”

“I don’t know,” she acknowledged, “unless–unless you come some time.”

“Look here, Agnes,” said he, taking the matter entirely in hand. “When we leave this place, we’ll leave together. I’ve arranged that all in my mind and intention. It’s all disposed of and settled. Here comes Boyle now, I think.”

Boyle left his horse standing a few rods distant and came over to where they sat.

“You look comfortable,” he commented, as serene and unperturbed as if the load of one more human life on his soul were a matter too light to be felt with inconvenience.265

“Very comfortable,” answered Slavens, rising stiffly. “We have nothing on our hands that common water will not wash off.”

“Oh, that nut!” depreciated Boyle. “He’d talked around for a year or two about getting me. I only beat him to it when he tried; that’s all.”

“But there was another occasion–another attempt that didn’t turn out quite like you intended,” said Slavens. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes; you’re the tin-horn doctor that held a man up in Comanche and stole the coat off of his back,” Boyle retorted with easy insolence.

Agnes looked at the doctor imploringly, plainly begging him not to provoke Boyle to another outbreak of violence. She was standing beside him, the fear and loathing which Boyle’s presence aroused undisguised in her frank face.

“It was an outrage against one of the honest men who tried to murder me,” said the doctor. “But, vicious as it was, neither Shanklin nor you, his side-partner, has ever made a squeal. If it was a holdup, why haven’t you sent one of your little sheriffs out after me?”

“I’m no partner of Hun Shanklin’s!” denied Boyle.

“Maybe you’ve parted company since the night you slugged me and nailed me up in that box for the river to hide your work.”

“I’ll make you prove that charge!” threatened Boyle hotly.266

“I can’t prove it,” admitted the doctor. “If I could, I’d have you in court tomorrow. But you were one of them, and I want you to understand fully that I know it, and will treat you accordingly in any private dealings that may come up between you and me.”

“If you keep spoutin’ it around that I ever slugged you, I’ll pull you into court and make you prove it! It’ll either be put up or shut up with you, mister!”

“Whenever you’re ready,” invited Slavens.

With somewhat more of ostentation than the simple act seemed to warrant, Boyle unbuttoned his coat, displaying his revolver as he made an exploration of his vest-pockets for a match to light his cigarette.

“Well, I guess you know what I’m here for?” Boyle suggested, passing his glance significantly from one to the other of them.

“Dr. Slavens is acquainted with your proposal,” said Agnes; “and it ought to be needless for me to say that I’ll not permit him to make any concession to shield myself.”

“Fine! fine!” said Boyle in mock applause, throwing his head back and snorting smoke.

“In the first place,” said Slavens, “your bluff don’t go. Miss Gates has not broken any law in registering and entering this land under analias. There’s no crime in assuming a name, and no felony in acquiring property under it, unless fraud is used. She has defrauded nobody, and you could not make a case against her in a thousand years!”267

“I can get an indictment–that’s a cinch!” declared Boyle.

“Go ahead,” said the doctor. “We’ve got some new blood in this country now, and we can find a jury that you don’t own and control when it comes to trial.”

“And after the indictment comes arrest and jail,” Boyle continued, overlooking the doctor’s argument in the lofty security of his position. “It would make a lot of noisy talk, considering the family reputation and all that.”

“And the outcome of it might be–and I doubt even that–that Miss Gates would lose her homestead,” Slavens supplied.

“You don’t know the Federal judge in this district,” Boyle grinned. “Jail’s what it means, and plenty of it, for the judge has to approve a bond, if you know what that means.”

“Why don’t you pay Dr. Slavens for his homestead, as you were ready to pay that man Peterson if you could have filed him on it?” Agnes asked.

“Because it’s mine already,” said Boyle. “This man stole the description of that land, as I have told you before, at the point of a gun.”

“Then you lied!” Slavens calmly charged.

Boyle hitched his hip, throwing the handle of his pistol into sight.

“You can say that,” said he, “because I’ve got to have your name on a paper.”

“I’ll never permit Dr. Slavens to sign away his268valuable claim to you,” declared Agnes. “I’ll not allow––”

Slavens lifted his hand for silence.

“I’ll do the talking for this family from now on,” said he, smiling reassuringly as he held her eyes a moment with his own.

He turned abruptly to Boyle.

“And the fighting, too, when necessary. You keep that little gun in its place when you’re around me, young man, or you’ll get hurt! One more break like that to show me that you’ve got it, and you and I will mix. Just put that down in your book.”

“Oh, all right, pardner!” returned Boyle with that jerky insolence which men of his kind assume when they realize that they have been called, and called hard. He buttoned his coat.

“And as far as Miss Gates is concerned, consider her out of this case,” said Slavens. “But I want to have some private talk with you.”

They walked over to the place where Boyle’s horse stood, and there, out of the hearing of Agnes, Slavens sounded Jerry sharply on his intentions. It was plain that there was no bluff in Boyle; he meant what he threatened, and he was small enough to carry it through.

As an illustration of his far-reaching influence, Boyle pointed out to Slavens that nobody had approached the physician with an offer to buy him out, although one had appeared anxious enough to open negotiations the day he filed.269

“When we tell a man to lay down in this part of the country, he lays down,” said Boyle; “and when we order him to walk on his hind legs, he walks. Nobody will offer you any money for that place; it isn’t worth anything to a soul on earth but me. You couldn’t sell out in a century. You’ll get that through your nut if you hang around here long enough.”

For a little while Slavens thought it over, walking away a few paces and appraising the situation studiously. Suddenly he wheeled and confronted Boyle, leveling his finger at his face.

“Your bluff don’t go, Boyle!” said he. “You’d just as well get on your horse and light out; and if you want to bring it to a fight, then let it be a fight. We’ll meet you on any ground you pick.”

“You’re a fool!” snarled Boyle.

“Then I’ll be a bigger one–big enough to call you to account before another day has passed over your head for your part in that dirty work in Comanche that night. And I want to lay it off to you right now that all the influence you can command in this state isn’t going to save you when I go after you!”

Boyle picked up his bridle-reins and threaded his arm through them, standing so, legs wide apart, while he rolled a cigarette. As it dangled between his lips and the smoke of it rose up, veiling his eyes, he peered narrowly through it at the doctor.

“There’s a man in the graveyard up at Cheyenne that made a talk like that one time,” he said.270

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” returned Slavens, quite unmoved. “I’ll meet you at the hotel in Meander tomorrow morning at nine o’clock for a settlement, one way or the other.”

“One way or the other,” repeated Boyle.

He mounted his horse and rode away toward Meander, trailing a thin line of smoke behind him.

Agnes hurried forward to meet Slavens as he turned toward her. Her face was bloodless, her bosom agitated.

“I heard part of what you said,” she told him. “Surely you don’t mean to go over there and fight him on his own ground, among his friends?”

“I’m going over there to see the county attorney,” said he. “He’s from Kansas, and a pretty straight sort of chap, it seemed to me from what I saw of him. I’m going to put this situation of ours before him, citing a hypothetical case, and get his advice. I don’t believe that there’s a shred of a case against you, and I doubt whether Boyle can bluff the government officials into making a move in it, even with all his influence.”

“And you’ll come back here and tell me what he says, no matter what his opinion may be, before you act one way or another?”

“If you wish it, although–Well, yes–if you wish it.”

“I do, most earnestly,” she assured him.

“You need a good sleep,” he counseled. “Turn in as soon as I’m gone, and don’t worry about this.271There’s a good deal of bluff in Boyle.”

“He’s treacherous, and he shoots wonderfully. He killed that poor fellow last night without ever seeing him at all.”

“But I’m not going to take a shot at him out of the dark,” said he.

“I know. But I’ll be uneasy until you return.”

“There’s too much trouble in your face today for one of your years,” he said, lifting her chin with rather a professional rebuke in his eyes. “You’ll have to put it down, or it will make you old. Go right on dreaming and planning; things will come out exactly as you have designed.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, but with little hope in her voice.

Slavens saddled his horse after they had refreshed themselves with coffee. Agnes stood by, racked with an anxiety which seemed to grind her heart. The physician thought of the pioneer women of his youth, of those who lived far out on the thin edge of prairie reaches, and in the gloom of forests which groaned around them in the lone winds of winter nights. There was the same melancholy of isolation in Agnes’ eyes today as he had seen in theirs; the same sad hopelessness; the same hunger, and the longing to fly from the wilderness and its hardships, heart-weariness, and pain.

Her hand lay appealingly upon his shoulder for a moment before he mounted, and her face was turned up to him, unspoken yearning on her lips.272

“Promise me again before you go that you will come back here before you relinquish your homestead to Boyle,” she demanded. “Promise me that, no matter what the lawyer’s opinion may be, you’ll return here before you do anything else at all.”

“I promise you,” said he.

When he had ridden a little way he halted his horse and turned in his saddle to look back. She was sitting there in the sun, her head bowed, her hands clasped over her face, as if she wept or prayed. A little while he waited there, as if meditating a return, as if he had forgotten something–some solace, perhaps, for which her lips had appealed to his heart dumbly.

Yet a sincere man seldom knows these things, which a trifler is so quick to see. He did not know, perhaps; or perhaps he was not certain enough to turn his horse and ride back to repair his omission. Presently he rode on slowly, his head bent, the bridle-reins loose in his hand.

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