Beauty Stanton threw a cloak over her bare shoulders and, hurriedly leaving the house by the side entrance, she stood a moment, breathless and excited, in the dark and windy street.
She had no idea why she halted there, for she wanted to run. But the instant she got out into the cool night air a check came to action and thought. Strange sensations poured in upon her—the darkness, lonesome and weird; the wailing wind with its weight of dust; the roar of Benton’s main thoroughfare; and the low, strange murmur, neither musical nor mirthful, behind her, from that huge hall she called her home. Stranger even than these emotions were the swelling and aching of her heart, the glow and quiver of her flesh, thrill on thrill, deep, like bursting pages of joy never before experienced, the physical sense of a touch, inexplicable in its power.
On her bare breast a place seemed to flush and throb and glow. “Ah!” murmured Beauty Stanton. “That girl laid her face here—over my heart! What was I to do?” she murmured. “Oh yes—to find her sweetheart—Neale!” Then she set off rapidly, but if she had possessed wings or the speed of the wind she could not have kept pace with her thoughts.
She turned the corner of the main street and glided among the hurrying throng. Men stood in groups, talking excitedly. She gathered that there had been fights. More than once she was addressed familiarly, but she did not hear what was said. The wide street seemed strange, dark, dismal, the lights yellow and flaring, the wind burdened, the dark tide of humanity raw, wild animal, unstable. Above the lights and the throngs hovered a shadow—not the mantle of night nor the dark desert sky.
Her steps took familiar ground, yet she seemed not to know this Benton.
“Once I was like Allie Lee!” she whispered. “Not so many years ago.”
And the dark tide of men, the hurry and din, the wind and dust, the flickering lights, all retreated spectral—like to the background of a mind returned to youth, hope, love, home. She saw herself at eighteen—yes, Beauty Stanton even then, possessed of a beauty that was her ruin; at school, the favorite of a host of boys and girls; at home, where the stately oaks were hung with silver moss and the old Colonial house rang with song of sister and sport of brother, where a sweet-faced, gentle-voiced mother—
“Ah... Mother!” And at that word the dark tide of men seemed to rise and swell at her, to trample her sacred memory as inevitably and brutally as it had used her body.
Only the piercing pang of that memory remained with Beauty Stanton. She was a part of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life. She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild and passing monster of progress.
Her hurried steps carried her on with her errand. Neale! She knew where to find him. Often she had watched him play, always regretfully, conscious that he did not fit there. His indifference had baffled her as it had piqued her professional vanity. Men had never been indifferent to her; she had seen them fight for her mocking smiles. But Neale! He had been stone to her charm, yet kind, gracious, deferential. Always she had felt strangely shamed when he stood bareheaded before her. Beauty Stanton had foregone respect. Yet respect was what she yearned for. The instincts of her girlhood, surviving, made a whited sepulcher of her present life. She could not bear Neale’s indifference and she had failed to change it. Her infatuation, born of that hot-bed of Benton life, had beaten and burned itself to destruction against a higher and better love—the only love of her womanhood. She would have slaved for him. But he had passed her by, absorbed with his own secret, working toward some fateful destiny, lost, perhaps, like all the others there.
And now she learned that the mystery of him—his secret—was the same old agony of love that sent so many on endless, restless roads—Allie Lee! and he believed her dead!
After all the bitterness, life had moments of sweetest joy. Fate was being a little kind to her—Beauty Stanton. It would be from her lips Neale would hear that Allie Lee was alive—Beauty Stanton’s soul seemed to soar with the realization of how that news would uplift Neale, craze him with happiness, change his life, save him. He was going to hear the blessed tidings from a woman whom he had scorned. Always afterward, then, he would think of Beauty Stanton with a grateful heart. She was to be the instrument of his salvation. Hough and Ancliffe had died to save Allie Lee from the vile clutch of Benton; but to Beauty Stanton, the woman of ill-fame, had been given the power. She gloried in it. Allie Lee was safely hidden in her house. The iniquity of her establishment furnished a haven for the body and life and soul of innocent Allie Lee. Beauty Stanton marveled at the strange ways of life. If she could have prayed, if she had ever dared to hope for some splendid duty, some atonement to soften the dark, grim ending of her dark career, it would not have been for so much as fate had now dealt to her. She was overwhelmed with her opportunity.
All at once she reached the end of the street. On each side the wall of lighted tents and houses ceased. Had she missed her way—gone down a side street to the edge of the desert? No. The rows of lights behind assured her this was the main street. Yet she was far from the railroad station. The crowds of men hurried by, as always. Before her reached a leveled space, dimly lighted, full of moving objects, and noise of hammers and wagons, and harsh voices. Then suddenly she remembered.
Benton was being evacuated. Tents and houses were being taken down and loaded on trains to be hauled to the next construction camp. Benton’s day was done! This was the last night. She had forgotten that the proprietor of her hall, from whom she rented it, had told her that early on the morrow he would take it down section by section, load it on the train, and put it together again for her in the next town. In forty-eight hours Benton would be a waste place of board floors, naked frames, debris and sand, ready to be reclaimed by the desert. It would be gone like a hideous nightmare, and no man would believe what had happened there.
The gambling-hell where she had expected to find Neale had vanished, in a few hours, as if by magic. Beauty Stanton retraced her steps. She would find Neale in one of the other places—the Big Tent, perhaps.
This hall was unusually crowded, and the scene had the number of men, though not the women and the hilarity and the gold, that was characteristic of pay-day in Benton. All the tables in the gambling-room were occupied.
Beauty Stanton stepped into this crowded room, her golden head uncovered, white and rapt and strangely dark-eyed, with all the beauty of her girlhood returned, and added to it that of a woman transformed, supreme in her crowning hour. As a bad woman, infatuated and piqued, she had failed to allure Neale to baseness; now as a good woman, with pure motive, she would win his friendship, his eternal gratitude.
Stanton had always been a target for eyes, yet never as now, when she drew every gaze like a dazzling light in a dark room.
As soon as she saw Neale she forgot every one else in that hall. He was gambling. He did not look up. His brow was somber and dark. She approached—stood behind him. Some of the players spoke to her, familiarly, as was her bitter due. Then Neale turned apparently to bow with his old courtesy. Thrill on thrill coursed over her. Always he had showed her respect, deference.
Her heart was full. She had never before enjoyed a moment like this. She was about to separate him from the baneful and pernicious life of the camps—to tender him a gift of unutterable happiness—to give all of him back to the work of the great railroad.
She put a trembling hand on his shoulder—bent over him. “Neale—come with me,” she whispered.
He shook his head.
“Yes! Yes!” she returned, her voice thrilling with emotion.
Wearily, with patient annoyance, he laid down his cards and looked up. His dark eyes held faint surprise and something that she thought might be pity.
“Miss Stanton—pardon me—but please understand—No!”
Then he turned and, picking up his cards, resumed the game.
Beauty Stanton suffered a sudden vague check. It was as if a cold thought was trying to enter a warm and glowing mind. She found speech difficult. She could not get off the track of her emotional flight. Her woman’s wit, tact, knowledge of men, would not operate.
“Neale!... Come with—me!” she cried, brokenly. “There’s—”
Some men laughed coarsely. That did not mean anything to Stanton until she saw how it affected Neale. His face flushed red and his hands clenched the cards.
“Say, Neale,” spoke up this brutal gamester, with a sneer, “never mind us. Go along with your lady friend... You’re ahead of the game—as I reckon she sees.”
Neale threw the cards in the man’s face; then, rising, he bent over to slap him so violently as to knock him off his chair.
The crash stilled the room. Every man turned to watch.
Neale stood up, his right arm down, menacingly. The gambler arose, cursing, but made no move to draw a weapon.
Beauty Stanton could not, to save her life, speak the words she wanted to say. Something impeding, totally unexpected, seemed to have arisen.
“Neale—come with—me!” was all she could say.
“No!” he declared, vehemently, with a gesture of disgust and anger.
That, following the coarse implication of the gambler, conveyed to Stanton what all these men imagined. The fools! The fools! A hot vibrating change occurred in her emotion, but she controlled it. Neale turned his back upon her. The crowd saw and many laughed. Stanton felt the sting of her pride, the leap of her blood. She was misunderstood, but what was that to her? As Neale stepped away she caught his arm—held him while she tried to get close to him so she could whisper. He shook her off. His face was black with anger. He held up one hand in a gesture that any woman would have understood and hated. It acted powerfully upon Beauty Stanton. Neale believed she was importuning him. To him her look, whisper, touch had meant only the same as to these coarse human animals gaping and grinning as they listened. The sweetest and best and most exalted moment she had ever known was being made bitter as gall, sickening, hateful. She must speak openly, she must make him understand.
“Allie Lee!... At my house!” burst out Stanton, and then, as if struck by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.
The change in Neale was swift, terrible. Not comprehension, but passion transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious, agonized, acting in seeming righteous and passionate repudiation of a sacrilege.
“———!” His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton’s soul into hellish revolt. Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her. He struck her—hard—across the mouth.
“Don’t breathe that name!”
Beauty Stanton’s fear suddenly broke. Blindly she ran out into the street. She fell once—jostled against a rail. The lights blurred; the street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through deadened ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and unreal.
“He struck me! He called me———!” she gasped. And the exaltation of the last hour vanished as if it had never been. All the passion of her stained and evil years leaped into ascendency. “Hell—hell! I’ll have him knifed—I’ll see him dying! I’ll wet my hands in his blood! I’ll spit in his face as he dies!”
So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house. There is no flame of hate so sudden and terrible and intense as that of the lost woman. Beauty Stanton’s blood had turned to vitriol. Men had wronged her, ruined her, dragged her down into the mire. One by one, during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave behind something evil in exchange. She was what they had made her. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea. Her heart was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires. Her body was a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs. The weight of all the iron and stone used in the construction of the great railroad was the burden upon her shoulders. These dark streams of humanity passing her in the street, these beasts of men, these hairy-breasted toilers, had found in her and her kind the strength or the incentive to endure, to build, to go on. And one of them, stupid, selfish, merciless, a man whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself—he had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no pardon from her class, a name that evoked all the furies and the powers of hell.
“Oh, to cut him—to torture him—to burn him alive... But it would not be enough!” she panted.
And into the mind that had been lately fixed in happy consciousness of her power of good there flashed a thousand scintillating, corruscating gleams of evil thought. And then came a crowning one, an inspiration straight from hell.
“By God! I’ll make of Allie Lee the thing I am! The thing he struck—the thing he named!”
The woman in Beauty Stanton ceased to be. All that breathed, in that hour, was what men had made her. Revenge, only a word! Murder, nothing! Life, an implacable, inexplicable, impossible flux and reflux of human passion! Reason, intelligence, nobility, love, womanhood, motherhood—all the heritage of her sex—had been warped by false and abnormal and terrible strains upon her physical and emotional life. No tigress, no cannibal, no savage, no man, no living creature except a woman of grace who knew how far she had fallen could have been capable of Beauty Stanton’s deadly and immutable passion to destroy. Thus life and nature avenged her. Her hate was immeasurable. She who could have walked naked and smiling down the streets of Benton or out upon the barren desert to die for the man she loved had in her the inconceivable and mysterious passion of the fallen woman; she could become a flame, a scourge, a fatal wind, a devastation. She was fire to man; to her own sex, ice. Stanton reached her house and entered. Festivities in honor of the last night of Benton were already riotously in order. She placed herself well back in the shadow and watched the wide door.
“The first man who enters I’ll give him this key!” she hissed.
She was unsteady on her feet. All her frame quivered. The lights in the hall seemed to have a reddish tinge. She watched. Several men passed out. Then a tall, stalking form appeared, entering.
A ball of fire in Stanton’s breast leaped and burst. She had recognized in that entering form the wildest, the most violent and the most dangerous man in Benton—Larry Red King.
Stanton stepped forward and for the first time in the cowboy’s presence she did not experience that singular chill of gloom which he was wont to inspire in her.
Her eyes gloated over King. Tall, lean, graceful, easy, with his flushed ruddy face and his flashing blue eyes and the upstanding red hair, he looked exactly what he was—a handsome red devil, fearing no man or thing, hell-bent in his cool, reckless wildness.
He appeared to be half-drunk. Stanton was trained to read the faces of men who entered there; and what she saw in King’s added the last and crowning throb of joy to her hate. If she had been given her pick of the devils in Benton she would have selected this stalking, gun-packing cowboy.
“Larry, I’ve a new girl here,” she said. “Come.”
“Evenin’, Miss—Stanton,” he drawled. He puffed slightly, after the manner of men under the influence of liquor, and a wicked, boyish, heated smile crossed his face.
She led him easily. But his heavy gun bumped against her, giving her little cold shudders. The passage opened into a wide room, which in turn opened into her dancing-hall. She saw strange, eager, dark faces among the men present, but in her excitement she did not note them particularly. She led Larry across the wide room, up a stairway to another hall, and down this to the corner of an intersecting passageway.
“Take—this—key!” she whispered. Her hand shook. She felt herself to be a black and monstrous creature. All of Benton seemed driving her. She was another woman. This was her fling at a rotten world, her slap in Neale’s face. But she could not speak again; her lips failed. She pointed to a door.
She waited long enough to see the stalking, graceful cowboy halt in front of the right door. Then she fled.
For many moments after the beautiful bare-armed woman closed and locked the door Allie Lee sat in ecstasy, in trembling anticipation of Neale.
Gradually, however, in intervals of happy mind-wanderings, other thoughts intruded. This little bedroom affected her singularly and she was at a loss to account for the fact. It did not seem that she was actually afraid to be there, for she was glad. Fear of Durade and his gang recurred, but she believed that the time of her deliverance was close at hand. Possibly Durade, with some of his men, had been killed in the fight with Hough. Then she remembered having heard the Spaniard order Fresno and Mull to go round by the street. They must be on her trail at this very moment. Ancliffe had been seen, and not much time could elapse before her whereabouts would be discovered. But Allie bore up bravely. She was in the thick of grim and bloody and horrible reality. Those brave men, strangers to her, had looked into her face, questioned her, then had died for her. It was all so unbelievable. In another room, close to her, lay Ancliffe, dead. Allie tried not to think of him; of the remorseless way in which he had killed the Mexican; of the contrast between this action and his gentle voice and manner. She tried not to think of the gambler Hough—the cold iron cast of his face as he won Durade’s gold, the strange, intent look which he gave her a moment before the attack. There was something magnificent in Ancliffe’s bringing her to a refuge while he was dying; there was something magnificent in Hough’s standing off the gang. Allie divined that through her these two men had fought and died for something in themselves as well as for her honor and life.
The little room seemed a refuge for Allie, yet it was oppressive, as had been the atmosphere of the parlor where Ancliffe lay. But this oppressiveness was not death. Allie had become familiar with death near at hand. This refuge made her flesh creep.
The room was not the home of any one—it was not inhabited, it was not livable. Yet it contained the same kind of furniture Durade had bought for her and it was clean and comfortable. Still, Allie shrank from touching anything. Through the walls came the low, strange, discordant din to which she had become accustomed—an intense, compelling blend of music, song, voice, and step actuated by one spirit. Then at times she imagined she heard distant hammering and the slap of a falling board.
Probably Allie had not stayed in this room many moments when she began to feel that she had been there hours. Surely the woman would return soon with Neale. And the very thoughts drove all else out of her mind, leaving her palpitating with hope, sick with longing.
Footsteps outside distracted her from the nervous, dreamy mood. Some one was coming along the hall. Her heart gave a wild bound—then sank. The steps passed by her door. She heard the thick, maudlin voice of a man and the hollow, trilling laugh of a girl.
Allie’s legs began to grow weak under her. The strain, the suspense, the longing grew to be too much for her and occasioned a revulsion of feeling. She had let her hopes carry her too high.
Suddenly the door-handle rattled and turned. Allie was brought to a stifling expectancy, motionless in the center of the room. Some one was outside at the door. Could it be Neale? It must be! Her sensitive ears caught short, puffing breaths—then the click of a key in the lock. Allie stood there in an anguish of suspense, with the lift of her heart almost suffocating her. Like a leaf in the wind she quivered.
Whoever was out there fumbled at the key. Then the lock rasped, the handle turned, the door opened. A tall man swaggered in, with head bent sideways, his hand removing the key from the lock. Before he saw Allie he closed the door. With that he faced around.
Allie recognized the red face, the flashing eyes, the flaming hair.
“Larry!” she cried, with bursting heart. She took a quick step, ready to leap into his arms, but his violent start checked her. Larry staggered back—put a hand out. His face was heated and flushed as Allie had never seen it. A stupid surprise showed there. Slowly his hand moved up to cross his lips, to brush through his red hair; then with swifter movement it swept back to feel the door, as if he wanted the touch of tangible things.
“Reckon I’m seein’ ‘em again!” he muttered to himself. “Oh, Larry—I’m Allie Lee!” she cried, holding out her hands.
She saw the color fade out of his face. A shock seemed to go over his body. He took a couple of dragging strides toward her. His eyes had the gaze of a man who did not believe what he saw. The hand he reached out shook.
“I’m no ghost! Larry, don’t—you—know me?” she faltered. Indeed he must have thought her a phantom. Great, clammy drops stood out upon his brow.
“Dear old—redhead!” she whispered, brokenly, with a smile of agony and joy. He would know her when she spoke that way—called him the name she had tormented him with—the name no one else would have dared to use.
Then she saw he believed in her reality. His face began to work. She threw her arms about him—she gave up to a frenzy of long-deferred happiness. Where Larry was there would Neale be.
“Allie—it ain’t—you?” he asked, hoarsely, as he hugged her close.
“Oh, Larry—yes—yes—and I’ll die of joy!” she whispered.
“Then you shore ain’t—daid?” he went on, incredulously.
How sweet to Allie was the old familiar Southern drawl!
“Dead? Never....Why, I’ve kissed you!... and you haven’t kissed me back.”
She felt his breast heave as he lifted her off her feet to kiss her awkwardly, boyishly.
“Shore—the world’s comin’ to an end!... But mebbe I’m only drunk!”
He held her close, towering over her, while he gazed around him and down at her, shaking his head, muttering again in bewilderment.
“Reddy dear—where, oh, where is Neale?” she breathed, all her heart in her voice.
As he released her Allie felt a difference. His whole body seemed to gather, to harden, then vibrate, as if he had been stung.
“My Gawd!” he whispered in hoarse accents of amaze and horror. “Is it you—Allie—here?”
“Of course it’s I,” replied Allie, blankly.
His face turned white to the lips.
“Reddy, what in the world is wrong?” she gasped, beginning to wring her hands.
Suddenly he leaped at her. With rude, iron grasp he forced her back, under the light, and fixed piercing eyes upon hers. He bent closer. Allie was frightened, yet fascinated. His gaze hurt with its intensity, its strange, penetrating power. Allie could not bear it.
“Allie, look at me,” he said, low and hard. “For I reckon you mayn’t hev very long to live!”
Allie struggled weakly. He looked so gray, grim, and terrible. But she could resist neither his strength nor his spirit. She lay quiet and met the clear, strange fire of his eyes. In a few swift moments he had changed utterly.
“Larry—aren’t—you—drunk?” she faltered.
“I was, but now I’m sober.... Girl, kiss me again!”
In wonder and fear Allie complied, now flushing scarlet.
“I—I was never so happy,” she whispered. “But Larry—you—you frighten me.... I—”
“Happy!” ejaculated Larry. Then he let her go and stood up, breathing hard. “There’s a hell of a lie heah somewheres—but it ain’t in you.”
“Larry, talk sense. I’m weak from long waiting. Oh, tell me of Neale!”
What a strange, curious, incomprehensible glance he gave her!
“Allie—Neale’s heah in Benton. I can take you to him in ten minutes. Do you want me to?”
“Want you to!... Reddy! I’ll die if you don’t take me—at once!” she cried, in anguish.
Again Larry loomed over her. This time he took her hands. “How long had you been heah—before I came?” he asked.
“Half an hour, perhaps; maybe less. But it seemed long.”
“Do you—know—what kind of a house you’re in—this heah room—what it means?” he went on, very low and huskily.
“No, I don’t,” she replied, instantly, with sudden curiosity. Questions and explanations rushed to her lips. But this strangely acting Larry dominated her.
“No other man—came in heah? I—was the first?”
“Yes.”
Then Larry King seemed to wrestle with—himself—with the hold drink had upon him—with that dark and sinister oppression so thick in the room. Allie thrilled to see his face grow soft and light up with the smile she remembered. How strange to feel in Larry King a spirit of gladness, of gratefulness for something beyond her understanding! Again he drew her close. And Allie, keen to read and feel him, wondered why he seemed to want to hide the sight of his face.
“Wal—I reckon—I was nigh onto bein’ drunk,” he said, haltingly. “Shore is a bad habit of mine—Allie.... Makes me think of a lot of—guff—jest the same as it makes me see snakes—an’ things.... I’ll quit drinkin’, Allie.... Never will touch liquor again—now if you’ll jest forgive.”
He spoke gently, huskily, with tears in his voice, and he broke off completely.
“Forgive! Larry, boy, there’s nothing to forgive—except your not hurrying me to—to him!”
She felt the same violent start in him. He held her a moment longer. Then, when he let go of her and stepped back Allie saw the cowboy as of old, cool and easy, yet somehow menacing, as he had been that day the strangers rode into Slingerland’s camp.
“Allie—thet woman Stanton locked you in heah?” queried Larry.
“Yes. Then she—”
Larry’s quick gesture enjoined silence. Stealthy steps sounded out in the hall. They revived Allie’s fear of Durade and his men. It struck her suddenly that Larry must be ignorant of the circumstances that had placed her there.
The cowboy unlocked the door—peeped out. As he turned, how clear and cold his blue eyes flashed!
“I’ll get you out of heah,” he whispered. “Come.”
They went out. The passage was empty. Allie clung closely to him. At the corner, where the halls met, he halted to listen. Only the low hum of voices came up.
“Larry, I must tell you,” whispered Allie. “Durade and his gang are after me. Fresno—Mull—Black—Dayss—you know them?”
“I—reckon,” he replied, swallowing hard. “My Gawd! you poor little girl! With that gang after you! An’ Stanton! I see all now.... She says to me, ‘Larry, I’ve a new girl heah’.... Wal, Beauty Stanton, thet was a bad deal for you—damn your soul!”
Trembling, Allie opened her lips to speak, but again the cowboy motioned her to be quiet. He need not have done it, for he suddenly seemed terrible, wild, deadly, rendering her mute.
“Allie if I call to you, duck behind me an’ hold on to me. I’ll take you out of heah.”
Then he put her on his left side and led her down the righthand passage toward the wide room Allie remembered. She looked on into the dance-hall. Larry did not hurry. He sauntered carelessly, yet Allie felt how intense he was. They reached the head of the stairway. The room was full of men and girls. The woman Stanton was there and, wheeling, she uttered a cry that startled Allie. Was this white, glaring-eyed, drawn-faced woman the one who had gone for Neale? Allie began to shake. She saw and heard with startling distinctness. The woman’s cry had turned every face toward the stairway, and the buzz of voices ceased.
Stanton ran to the stairway, started up, and halted, raising a white arm in passionate gesture.
“Where are you taking that girl?” she called, stridently.
Larry stepped down, drawing Allie with him. “I’m takin’ her to Neale.”
Stanton shrieked and waved her arms. Indeed, she seemed another woman from the one upon whose breast Allie had laid her head just a little while before.
“No, you won’t take her to Neale!” cried Stanton.
The cowboy stepped down slowly, guardedly, but he kept on. Allie saw men run out of the crowded dance-hall into the open space behind Stanton. Dark, hateful, well-remembered faces of Fresno—Mull—Black! Allie pressed the cowboy’s arm to warn him, and he, letting go of her, appeared to motion her behind him.
“Stanton! Get out of my way!” yelled Larry. His voice rang with a wild, ruthless note; it carried far and stiffened every figure except that of the frantic woman. With convulsed face, purple in its fury, and the hot eyes of a beast of prey she ran right up at the cowboy, heedless of the gun he held leveled low down.
He shot her. She swayed backward, uttering a low and horrible cry, and even as she swayed her face blanched and her eyes changed. She fell heavily, with her golden hair loosening and her bare white arms spreading wide. Then in the horror-stricken silence she lay there, still conscious, but with an awful hunted realization in the eyes fixed upon the cowboy, a great growing splotch of blood darkening the white of her dress.
Larry King did not look at Stanton and he kept moving down the steps; he was walking faster now, and he drew Allie behind him. The first of that stunned group to awake to action was the giant Fresno, as, with blind, unreasoning passion, he attempted to draw upon the cowboy. The boom of Larry’s big gun and the crash of Fresno as he fell woke the spellbound crowd into an uproar. Screaming women and shouting men rushed madly back into the dance-hall.
Larry turned toward the hallway leading to the street. Mull and Black began shooting as he turned, and hit him, for Allie, holding fast to him, felt the vibrating shock of his body. With two swift shots Larry killed both men. Mull fell across the width of the hall. And as Allie stumbled over his body she looked down to see his huge head, his ruddy face, and the great ox-eyes, rolling and ghastly. In that brief glance she saw him die.
The cowboy strode fast now. Allie, with hands clenched in his coat, clung desperately to him. Hollow booms of guns filled the passageway, and hoarse shouts of alarmed men sounded from the street. Burned powder smoke choked Allie. The very marrow of her bones seemed curdled. She saw the red belches of fire near and far; she passed a man floundering and bellowing on the floor; she felt Larry jerk back as if struck, and then something hot grazed her shoulder. A bullet had torn clear through him, from breast to back. He staggered, but he went on. Another man lay on the threshold of the wide door, his head down the step, and his pallid face blood-streaked. A smoking gun lay near his twitching hand. That pallid face belonged to Dayss.
Larry King staggered out into an empty street, looking up and down. “Wal, I reckon—thet’s—aboot—all!” he drawled, with low, strangled utterance.
Then swaying from side to side he strode swiftly, almost falling forward, holding tight to Allie. They drew away from the brighter lights. Allie was dimly aware of moving forms ahead and across the street. Once, fearfully, she looked back, to see if they were followed.
The cowboy halted, tottering against a house, He seemed pale and smiling.
“Run—Allie!” he whispered.
“No—no—no!” she replied, clinging to him. “You’re shot!... Oh, Larry—come on!”
“TELL—MY PARD—NEALE—”
His head fell back hard against the wood and his body, sagging, lodged there. Life had passed out of the gray face. Larry Red King died standing, with a gun in each hand, and the name of his friend the last word upon his lips.
“Oh, Larry—Larry!” moaned Allie.
She could not run. She could scarcely walk. Dark forms loomed up. Her strength failed, and as she reeled, sinking down, rude hands grasped her. Above her bent the gleaming face and glittering eyes of Durade.
Beauty Stanton opened her eyes to see blue sky through the ragged vents of a worn-out canvas tent. An unusual quietness all around added to the strange unreality of her situation. She heard only a low, mournful seeping of wind-blown sand. Where was she? What had happened? Was this only a vivid, fearful dream?
She felt stiff, unable to move. Did a ponderous weight hold her down? Her body seemed immense, full of dull, horrible ache, and she had no sensation of lower limbs except a creeping cold.
Slowly she moved her eyes around. Yes, she was in a tent—an abandoned tent, old, ragged, dirty; and she lay on the bare ground. Through a wide tear in the canvas she saw a stretch of flat ground covered with stakes and boards and denuded frameworks and piles of debris. Then grim reality entered her consciousness. Benton was evacuated. Benton was depopulated. Benton—houses, tents, people—had moved away.
During her unconsciousness, perhaps while she had been thought dead, she had been carried to this abandoned tent. A dressing-gown covered her, the one she always put on in the first hours after arising. The white dress she had worn last night—was it last night?—still adorned her, but all her jewelry had been taken. Then she remembered being lifted to a couch and cried over by her girls, while awestruck men came to look at her and talk among themselves. But she had heard how the cowboy’s shot had doomed her—how he had fought his way out, only to fall dead in the street and leave the girl to be taken by Durade.
Now Beauty Stanton realized that she had been left alone in an abandoned tent of an abandoned camp—to die. She became more conscious then of dull physical agony. But neither fear of death nor thought of pain occupied her mind. That suddenly awoke to remorse. With the slow ebbing of her life evil had passed out. If she had been given a choice between the salvation of her soul and to have Neale with her in her last moments, to tell him the truth, to beg his forgiveness, to die in his arms, she would have chosen the latter. Would not some trooper come before she died, some one to whom she could intrust a message? Some grave-digger! For the great U. P. R. buried the dead it left in its bloody tracks!
With strange, numb hands Stanton searched the pockets of her dressing-gown, to find, at length, a little account-book with pencil attached. Then, with stiffened fingers, but acute mind, she began to write to Neale. As she wrote into each word went something of the pang, the remorse, the sorrow, the love she felt; and when that letter was ended she laid the little book on her breast and knew for the first time in many years—peace.
She endured the physical agony; she did not cry out, or complain, or repent, or pray. Most of the spiritual emotion and life left in her had gone into the letter. Memory called up only the last moments of her life—when she saw Ancliffe die; when she folded innocent Allie Lee to the breast that had always yearned for a child; when Neale in his monstrous stupidity had misunderstood her; when he had struck her before the grinning crowd, and in burning words branded her with the one name unpardonable to her class; when at the climax of a morbid and all-consuming hate, a hate of the ruined woman whose body and mind had absorbed the vile dregs, the dark fire and poison, of lustful men, she had inhumanly given Allie Lee to the man she had believed the wildest, most depraved, and most dangerous brute in all Benton; when this Larry King, by some strange fatality, becoming as great as he was wild, had stalked out to meet her like some red and terrible death.
She remembered now that strange, icy gloom and shudder she had always felt in the presence of the cowboy. Within her vitals now was the same cold, deadly, sickening sensation, and it was death. Always she had anticipated it, but vaguely, unrealizingly.
Larry King had lifted the burden of her life. She would have been glad—if only Neale had understood her! That was her last wavering conscious thought.
Now she drifted from human consciousness to the instinctive physical struggle of the animal to live, and that was not strong. There came a moment, the last, between life and death, when Beauty Stanton’s soul lingered on the threshold of its lonely and eternal pilgrimage, and then drifted across into the gray shadows, into the unknown, out to the great beyond.
Casey leaned on his spade while he wiped the sweat from his brow and regarded his ally McDermott. Between them yawned a grave they had been digging and near at hand lay a long, quiet form wrapped in old canvas.
“Mac, I’ll be domned if I loike this job,” said Casey, drawing hard at his black pipe.
“Yez want to be a directhor of the U. P. R., huh?” replied McDermott.
“Shure an’ I’ve did ivery job but run an ingine.... It’s imposed on we are, Mac. Thim troopers niver work. Why couldn’t they plant these stiffs?”
“Casey, I reckon no wan’s bossin’ us. Benton picked up an’ moved yistiday. An’ we’ll be goin’ soon wid the graveltrain. It’s only dacent of us to bury the remains of Benton. An’ shure yez ought to be glad to see that orful red-head cowboy go under the ground.”
“An’ fer why?” queried Casey.
“Didn’t he throw a gun on yez once an’ scare the daylights out of yez?”
“Mac, I wuz as cool as a coocumber. An’ as to buryin’ Larry King, I’m proud an’ sorry. He wuz Neale’s fri’nd.”
“My Gawd! but he wor chain lightnin’, Casey. They said he shot the woman Stanton, too.”
“Mac, thet wore a dom’ lie, I bet,” replied Casey. “He shot up Stanton’s hall, an’ a bullet from some of thim wot was foightin’ him must hev hit her.”
“Mebbe. But it wor bad bizness. That cowboy hit iviry wan of thim fellars in the same place. Shure, they niver blinked afther.”
“An’ Mac, the best an’ dirtiest job we’ve had on this,” Casey’s huge hand indicated a row of freshly filled graves, “U. P. was the plantin’ of thim fellars,” over which the desert sand was seeping. Then dropping his spade, he bent to the quiet figure.
“Lay hold, Mac,” he said.
They lowered the corpse into the hole. Casey stood up, making a sign of the cross before him.
“He wor a man!”
Then they filled the grave.
“Mac, wouldn’t it be dacent to mark where Larry King’s buried? A stone or wooden cross with his name?”
McDermott wrinkled his red brow and scratched his sandy beard. Then he pointed. “Casey, wot’s the use? See, the blowin’ sand’s kivered all the graves.”
“Mac, yez wor always hell at shirkin’ worrk. Come on, now, Drill, ye terrier, drill!”
They quickly dug another long, narrow hole. Then, taking a rude stretcher, they plodded away in the direction of a dilapidated tent that appeared to be the only structure left of Benton. Casey entered ahead of his comrade.
“Thot’s sthrange!”
“Wot?” queried McDermott.
“Didn’t yez kiver her face whin we laid her down here?”
“Shure an’ I did, Casey.”
“An’ that face has a different look now!... Mac, see here!”
Casey stooped to pick up a little book from the woman’s breast. His huge fingers opened it with difficulty.
“Mac, there’s wroitin’ in ut!” he exclaimed.
“Wal, rade, ye baboon.”
“Oh, I kin rade ut, though I ain’t much of a wroiter meself,” replied Casey, and then laboriously began to decipher the writing. He halted suddenly and looked keenly at McDermott.
“Wot the divil!... B’gorra, ut’s to me fri’nd Neale—an’ a love letter—an’—”
“Wal, kape it, thin, fer Neale an’ be dacent enough to rade no more.”
Lifting Beauty Stanton, they carried her out into the sunlight. Her white face was a shadowed and tragic record.
“Mac, she wor shure a handsome woman,” said Casey, “an’ a loidy.”
“Casey, yez are always sorry fer somebody.... Thot Stanton wuz a beauty an’ she mebbe wuz a loidy. But she wuz dom’ bad.”
“Mac, I knowed long ago thot the milk of human kindness hed curdled in yez. An’ yez hev no brains.”
“I’m as intilligint as yez any day,” retorted McDermott.
“Thin why hedn’t yez seen thot this poor woman was alive whin we packed her out here? She come to an’ writ thot letter to Neale—thin she doied!”
“My Gawd! Casey, yez ain’t meanin’ ut!” ejaculated McDermott, aghast.
Casey nodded grimly, and then he knelt to listen at Stanton’s breast. “Stone dead now—thot’s shure.”
For her shroud these deliberate men used strippings of canvas from the tent, and then, carrying her up the bare and sandy slope, they lowered her into the grave next to the one of the cowboy.
Again Casey made a sign of the cross. He worked longer at the filling in than his comrade, and patted the mound of sand hard and smooth. When he finished, his pipe was out. He relighted it.
“Wal, Beauty Stanton, shure yez hev a cleaner grave than yez hed a bed.... Nice white desert sand.... An’ prisintly no man will ivir know where yez come to lay.”
The laborers shouldered their spades and plodded away.
The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets. Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place—a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense.
And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves.
In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.
The place that had known Benton knew it no more. Coyotes barked dismally down what had been the famous street of the camp and prowled in and out of the piles of debris and frames of wood. Gone was the low, strange roar that had been neither music nor mirth nor labor. Benton remained only a name.
The sun rose upon a squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife of toil and gold and lust and blood and death. A train passed that day, out of which engineer and fireman gazed with wondering eyes at what had been Benton. Like a mushroom it had arisen, and like a dust-storm on the desert wind it had roared away, bearing its freight of labor, of passion, and of evil. Benton had become a name—a fabulous name.
But nature seemed more merciful than life. For it began to hide what man had left—the scars of habitations where hell had held high carnival. Sunset came, then night and the starlight. The lonely hours were winged, as if in a hurry to resolve back into the elements the flimsy remains of that great camp.
And that spot was haunted.