The following afternoon cowboys and horse-wranglers, keen-eyed as Indians for tracks and trails, began to arrive in the quiet valley to which the Mormon women had been returned.
Under every cedar clump there were hobbled horses, packs, and rolled bedding in tarpaulins. Shefford and Joe Lake had pitched camp in the old site near the spring. The other men of Joe's escort went to the homes of the women; and that afternoon, as the curious visitors began to arrive, these homes became barred and dark and quiet, as if they had been closed and deserted for the winter. Not a woman showed herself.
Shefford and Joe, by reason of the location of their camp and their alertness, met all the new-comers. The ride from Stonebridge was a long and hard one, calculated to wear off the effects of the whisky imbibed by the adventure-seekers. This fact alone saved the situation. Nevertheless, Joe expected trouble. Most of the visitors were decent, good-natured fellows, merely curious, and simple enough to believe that this really was what the Mormons had claimed--a village of free women. But there were those among them who were coarse, evil-minded, and dangerous.
By supper-time there were two dozen or more of these men in the valley, camped along the west wall. Fires were lighted, smoke curled up over the cedars, gay songs disturbed the usual serenity of the place. Later in the early twilight the curious visitors, by twos and threes, walked about the village, peering at the dark cabins and jesting among themselves. Joe had informed Shefford that all the women had been put in a limited number of cabins, so that they could be protected. So far as Shefford saw or heard there was no unpleasant incident in the village; however, as the sauntering visitors returned toward their camps they loitered at the spring, and here developments threatened.
In spite of the fact that the majority of these cowboys and their comrades were decent-minded and beginning to see the real relation of things, they were not disposed to be civil to Shefford. They were certainly not Mormons. And his position, apparently as a Gentile, among these Mormons was one open to criticism. They might have been jealous, too; at any rate, remarks were passed in his hearing, meant for his ears, that made it exceedingly trying for him not to resent. Moreover, Joe Lake's increasing impatience rendered the situation more difficult. Shefford welcomed the arrival of Nas Ta Bega. The Indian listened to the loud talk of several loungers round the camp-fire; and thereafter he was like Shefford's shadow, silent, somber, watchful.
Nevertheless, it did not happen to be one of the friendly and sarcastic cowboys that precipitated the crisis. A horse-wrangler named Hurley, a man of bad repute, as much outlaw as anything, took up the bantering.
“Say, Shefford, what in the hell's your job here, anyway?” he queried as he kicked a cedar branch into the camp-fire. The brightening blaze showed him swarthy, unshaven, a large-featured, ugly man.
“I've been doing odd jobs for Withers,” replied Shefford. “Expect to drive pack-trains in here for a while.”
“You must stand strong with these Mormons. Must be a Mormon yerself?”
“No,” replied Shefford, briefly.
“Wal, I'm stuck on your job. Do you need a packer? I can throw a diamond-hitch better 'n any feller in this country.”
“I don't need help.”
“Mebbe you'll take me over to see the ladies,” he went on, with a coarse laugh.
Shefford did not show that he had heard. Hurley waited, leering as looked from the keen listeners to Shefford.
“Want to have them all yerself, eh?” he jeered.
Shefford struck him--sent him tumbling heavily, like a log. Hurley, cursing as he half rose, jerked his gun out. Nas Ta Bega, swift as light, kicked the gun out of his hand. And Joe Lake picked it up.
Deliberately the Mormon cocked the weapon and stood over Hurley.
“Get up!” he ordered, and Shefford heard the ruthless Mormon in him then.
Hurley rose slowly. Then Joe prodded him in the middle with the cocked gun. Shefford startled, expected the gun to go off. So did the others, especially Hurley, who shrank in panic from the dark Mormon.
“Rustle!” said Joe, and gave the man a harder prod. Assuredly the gun did not have a hair-trigger.
“Joe, mebbe it's loaded!” protested one of the cowboys.
Hurley shrank back, and turned to hurry away, with Joe close after him. They disappeared in the darkness. A constrained silence was maintained around the camp-fire for a while. Presently some of the men walked off and others began to converse. Everybody heard the sound of hoofs passing down the trail. The patter ceased, and in a few moments Lake returned. He still carried Hurley's gun.
The crowd dispersed then. There was no indication of further trouble. However, Shefford and Joe and Nas Ta Bega divided the night in watches, so that some one would be wide awake.
Early next morning there was an exodus from the village of the better element among the visitors. “No fun hangin' round hyar,” one of them expressed it, and as good-naturedly as they had come they rode away. Six or seven of the desperado class remained behind, bent on mischief; and they were reinforced by more arrivals from Stonebridge. They avoided the camp by the spring, and when Shefford and Lake attempted to go to them they gave them a wide berth. This caused Joe to assert that they were up to some dirty work. All morning they lounged around under the cedars, keeping out of sight, and evidently the reinforcement from Stonebridge had brought liquor. When they gathered together at their camp, half drunk, all noisy, some wanting to swagger off into the village and others trying to hold them back, Joe Lake said, grimly, that somebody was going to get shot. Indeed, Shefford saw that there was every likelihood of bloodshed.
“Reckon we'd better take to one of the cabins,” said Joe.
Thereupon the three repaired to the nearest cabin, and, entering, kept watch from the windows. During a couple of hours, however, they did not see or hear anything of the ruffians. Then came a shot from over in the village, a single yell, and, after that, a scattering volley. The silence and suspense which followed were finally broken by hoof-beats. Nas Ta Bega called Joe and Shefford to the window he had been stationed at. From here they saw the unwelcome visitors ride down the trail, to disappear in the cedars toward the outlet of the valley. Joe, who had numbered them, said that all but one of them had gone.
“Reckon he got it,” added Joe.
So indeed it turned out; one of the men, a well-known rustler named Harker, had been killed, by whom no one seemed to know. He had brazenly tried to force his way into one of the houses, and the act had cost him his life. Naturally Shefford, never free from his civilized habit of thought, remarked apprehensively that he hoped this affair would not cause the poor women to be arrested again and haled before some rude court.
“Law!” grunted Joe. “There ain't any. The nearest sheriff is in Durango. That's Colorado. And he'd give us a medal for killing Harker. It was a good job, for it'll teach these rowdies a lesson.”
Next day the old order of life was resumed in the village. And the arrival of a heavily laden pack-train, under the guidance of Withers, attested to the fact that the Mormons meant not only to continue to live in the valley, but also to build and plant and enlarge. This was good news to Shefford. At least the village could be made less lonely. And there was plenty of work to give him excuse for staying there. Furthermore, Withers brought a message form Bishop Kane to the effect that the young man was offered a place as teacher in the school, in co-operation with the Mormon teachers. Shefford experienced no twinge of conscience when he accepted.
It was the fourth evening after the never-to-be-forgotten moonlight ride to the valley that Shefford passed under the dark pinyon-trees on his way to Fay Larkin's cottage. He paused in the gloom and memory beset him. The six months were annihilated, and it was the night he had fled. But now all was silent. He seemed to be trying to drag himself back. A beginning must be made. Only how to meet her--what to say--what to conceal!
He tapped on the door and she came out. After all, it was a meeting vastly different from what his feeling made him imagine it might have been. She was nervous, frightened, as were all the other women, for that matter. She was alone in the cottage. He made haste to reassure her about the improbability of any further trouble such as had befallen the last week. As he had always done on those former visits to her, he talked rapidly, using all his wit, and here his emotion made him eloquent; he avoided personalities, except to tell about his prospects of work in the village, and he sought above all to lead her mind from thought of herself and her condition. Before he left her he had the gladness of knowing he had succeeded.
When he said good night he felt the strange falsity of his position. He did not expect to be able to keep up the deception for long. That roused him, and half the night he lay awake, thinking. Next day he was the life of the work and study and play in that village. Kindness and good-will did not need inspiration, but it was keen, deep passion that made him a plotter for influence and friendship. Was there a woman in the village whom he might trust, in case he needed one? And his instinct guided him to her whom he had liked well--Ruth. Ruth Jones she had called herself at the trial, and when Shefford used the name she laughed mockingly. Ruth was not very religious, and sometimes she was bitter and hard. She wanted life, and here she was a prisoner in a lonely valley. She welcomed Shefford's visits. He imagined that she had slightly changed, and whether it was the added six months with its trouble and pain or a growing revolt he could not tell. After a time he divined that the inevitable retrogression had set in: she had not enough faith to uphold the burden she had accepted, nor the courage to cast it off. She was ready to love him. That did not frighten Shefford, and if she did love him he was not so sure it would not be an anchor for her. He saw her danger, and then he became what he had never really been in all the days of his ministry--the real helper. Unselfishly, for her sake, he found power to influence her; and selfishly, for the sake of Fay Larkin, he began slowly to win her to a possible need.
The days passed swiftly. Mormons came and went, though in the open day, as laborers; new cabins went up, and a store, and other improvements. Some part of every evening Shefford spent with Fay, and these visits were no longer unknown to the village. Women gossiped, in a friendly way about Shefford, but with jealous tongues about the girl. Joe Lake told Shefford the run of the village talk. Anything concerning the Sago Lily the droll Mormon took to heart. He had been hard hit, and admitted it. Sometimes he went with Shefford to call upon her, but he talked little and never remained long. Shefford had anticipated antagonism on the part of Joe; however, he did not find it.
Shefford really lived through the busy day for that hour with Fay in the twilight. And every evening seemed the same. He would find her in the dark, alone, silent, brooding, hopeless. Her mood did not puzzle him, but how to keep from plunging her deeper into despair baffled him. He exhausted all his powers trying to do for her what he had been able to do for Ruth. Yet he failed. Something had blunted her. The shadow of that baneful trial hovered over her, and he came to sense a strange terror in her. It was mostly always present. Was she thinking of Jane Withersteen and Lassiter, left dead or imprisoned in the valley from which she had been brought so mysteriously? Shefford wearied his brain revolving these questions. The fate of her friends, and the cross she bore--of these was tragedy born, but the terror--that Shefford divined came of waiting for the visit of the Mormon whose face she had never seen. Shefford prayed that he might never meet this man. Finally he grew desperate. When he first arrived at the girl's home she would speak, she showed gladness, relief, and then straightway she dropped back into the shadow of her gloom. When he got up to go then there was a wistfulness, an unspoken need, an unconscious reliance, in her reluctant good night.
Then the hour came when he reached his limit. He must begin his revelation.
“You never ask me anything--let alone about myself,” he said.
“I'd like to hear,” she replied, timidly.
“Do I strike you as an unhappy man?”
“No, indeed.”
“Well, how DO I strike you?”
This was an entirely new tack he had veered to.
“Very good and kind to us women,” she said.
“I don't know about that. If I am so, it doesn't bring me happiness. ... Do you remember what I told you once, about my being a preacher--disgrace, ruin, and all that--and my rainbow-chasing dream out here after a--a lost girl?”
“I--remember all--you said,” she replied, very low.
“Listen.” His voice was a little husky, but behind it there seemed a tide of resistless utterance. “Loss of faith and name did not send me to this wilderness. But I had love--love for that lost girl, Fay Larkin. I dreamed about her till I loved her. I dreamed that I would find her--my treasure--at the foot of a rainbow. Dreams!... When you told me she was dead I accepted that. There was truth in your voice. I respected your reticence. But something died in me then. I lost myself, the best of me, the good that might have uplifted me. I went away, down upon the barren desert, and there I rode and slept and grew into another and a harder man. Yet, strange to say, I never forgot her, though my dreams were done. As I toiled and suffered and changed I loved her--if not her, the thought of her--more and more. Now I have come back to these walled valleys--to the smell of pinyon, to the flowers in the nooks, to the wind on the heights, to the silence and loneliness and beauty. And here the dreams come back and SHE is WITH me always. Her spirit is all that keeps me kind and good, as you say I am. But I suffer, I long for her alive. If I love her dead, how could I love her living! Always I torture myself with the vain dream that--that she MIGHT not be dead. I have never been anything but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind.... I love her. Does that seem strange to you? But it would not if you understood. Think. I had lost faith, hope. I set myself a great work--to find Fay Larkin. And by the fire and the iron and the blood that I felt it would cost to save her some faith must come to me again.... My work is undone--I've never saved her. But listen, how strange it is to feel--now--as I let myself go--that just the loving her and the living here in the wildness that holds her somewhere have brought me hope again. Some faith must come, too. It was through her that I met this Indian, Nas Ta Bega. He has saved my life--taught me much. What would I ever have learned of the naked and vast earth, of the sublimity of the wild uplands, of the storm and night and sun, if I had not followed a gleam she inspired? In my hunt for a lost girl perhaps I wandered into a place where I shall find a God and my salvation. Do you marvel that I love Fay Larkin--that she is not dead to me? Do you marvel that I love her, when I KNOW, were she alive, chained in a cañon, or bound, or lost in any way, my destiny would lead me to her, and she should be saved?”
Shefford ended, overcome with emotion. In the dusk he could not see the girl's face, but the white form that had drooped so listlessly seemed now charged by some vitalizing current. He knew he had spoken irrationally; still he held it no dishonor to have told her he loved her as one dead. If she took that love to the secret heart of living Fay Larkin, then perhaps a spirit might light in her darkened soul. He had no thought yet that Fay Larkin might ever belong to him. He divined a crime--he had seen her agony. And this avowal of his was only one step toward her deliverance.
Softly she rose, retreating into the shadow.
“Forgive me if I--I disturb you, distress you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you. She was--somehow known to you. I am not happy. And are YOU happy?... Let her memory be a bond between us.... Good night.”
“Good night.”
Faintly as the faintest whisper breathed her reply, and, though it came from a child forced into womanhood, it whispered of girlhood not dead, of sweet incredulity, of amazed tumult, of a wondering, frantic desire to run and hide, of the bewilderment incident to a first hint of love.
Shefford walked away into the darkness. The whisper filled his soul. Had a word of love ever been spoken to that girl? Never--not the love which had been on his lips. Fay Larkin's lonely life spoke clearly in her whisper.
Next morning as the sun gilded the looming peaks and shafts of gold slanted into the valley she came swiftly down the path to the spring.
Shefford paused in his task of chopping wood. Joe Lake, on his knees, with his big hands in a pan of dough, lifted his head to stare. She had left off the somber black hood, and, although that made a vast difference in her, still it was not enough to account for what struck both men.
“Good morning,” she called, brightly.
They both answered, but not spontaneously. She stopped at the spring and with one sweep of her strong arm filled the bucket and lifted it. Then she started back down the path and, pausing opposite the camp, set the bucket down.
“Joe, do you still pride yourself on your sour dough?” she asked.
“Reckon I do,” replied Joe, with a grin.
“I've heard your boasts, but never tasted your bread,” she went on.
“I'll ask you to eat with us some day.”
“Don't forget,” she replied.
And then shyly she looked at Shefford. She was like the fresh dawn, and the gold of the sun shone on her head.
“Have you chopped all that wood--so early?” she asked.
“Sure,” replied Shefford, laughing. “I have to get up early to keep Joe from doing all the camp chores.”
She smiled, and then to Shefford she seemed to gleam, to be radiant.
“It'd be a lovely morning to climb--'way high.”
“Why--yes--it would,” replied Shefford, awkwardly. “I wish I didn't have my work.”
“Joe, will YOU climb with me some day?”
“I should smile I will,” declared Joe.
“But I can run right up the walls.”
“I reckon. Mary, it wouldn't surprise me to see you fly.”
“Do you mean I'm like a cañon swallow or an angel?”
Then, as Joe stared speechlessly, she said good-by and, taking up the bucket, went on with her swift, graceful step.
“She's perked up,” said the Mormon, staring after her. “Never heard her say more 'n yes or no till now.”
“She did seem--bright,” replied Shefford.
He was stunned. What had happened to her? To-day this girl had not been Mary, the sealed wife, or the Sago Lily, alien among Mormon women. Then it flashed upon him--she was Fay Larkin. She who had regarded herself as dead had come back to life. In one short night what had transformed her--what had taken place in her heart? Shefford dared not accept, nor allow lodgment in his mind, a thrilling idea that he had made her forget her misery.
“Shefford, did you ever see her like that?” asked Joe.
“Never.”
“Haven't you--something to do with it?”
“Maybe I have. I--I hope so.”
“Reckon you've seen how she's faded--since the trial?”
“No,” replied Shefford, swiftly. “But I've not seen her face in daylight since then.”
“Well, take my hunch,” said Joe, soberly. “She's begun to fade like the cañon lily when it's broken. And she's going to die unless--”
“Why man!” ejaculated Shefford. “Didn't you see--”
“Sure I see,” interrupted the Mormon. “I see a lot you don't. She's so white you can look through her. She's grown thin, all in a week. She doesn't eat. Oh, I know, because I've made it my business to find out. It's no news to the women. But they'd like to see her die. And she will die unless--”
“My God!” exclaimed Shefford, huskily. “I never noticed--I never thought.... Joe, hasn't she any friends?”
“Sure. You and Ruth--and me. Maybe Nas Ta Bega, too. He watches her a good deal.”
“We can do so little, when she needs so much.”
“Nobody can help her, unless it's you,” went on the Mormon. “That's plain talk. She seemed different this morning. Why, she was alive--she talked--she smiled.... Shefford, if you cheer her up I'll go to hell for you!”
The big Mormon, on his knees, with his hands in a pan of dough, and his shirt all covered with flour, presented an incongruous figure of a man actuated by pathos and passion. Yet the contrast made his emotion all the simpler and stronger. Shefford grew closer to Joe in that moment.
“Why do you think I can cheer her, help her?” queried Shefford.
“I don't know. But she's different with you. It's not that you're a Gentile, though, for all the women are crazy about you. You talk to her. You have power over her, Shefford. I feel that. She's only a kid.”
“Who is she, Joe? Where did she come from?” asked Shefford, very low, with his eyes cast down.
“I don't know. I can't find out. Nobody knows. It's a mystery--to all the younger Mormons, anyway.”
Shefford burned to ask questions about the Mormon whose sealed wife the girl was, but he respected Joe too much to take advantage of him in a poignant moment like this. Besides, it was only jealousy that made him burn to know the Mormon's identity, and jealousy had become a creeping, insidious, growing fire. He would be wise not to add fuel to it. He rejected many things before he thought of one that he could voice to his friend.
“Joe, it's only her body that belongs to--to.... Her soul is lost to--”
“John Shefford, let that go. My mind's tired. I've been taught so and so, and I'm not bright.... But, after all, men are much alike. The thing with you and me is this--we don't want to see HER grave!”
Love spoke there. The Mormon had seized upon the single elemental point that concerned him and his friend in their relation to this unfortunate girl. His simple, powerful statement united them; it gave the lie to his hint of denseness; it stripped the truth naked. It was such a wonderful thought-provoking statement that Shefford needed time to ponder how deep the Mormon was. To what limit would he go? Did he mean that here, between two men who loved the same girl, class, duty, honor, creed were nothing if they stood in the way of her deliverance and her life?
“Joe Lake, you Mormons are impossible,” said Shefford, deliberately. “You don't want to see her grave. So long as she lives--remains on the earth--white and gold like the flower you call her, that's enough for you. It's her body you think of. And that's the great and horrible error in your religion.... But death of the soul is infinitely worse than death of the body. I have been thinking of her soul.... So here we stand, you and I. You to save her life--I to save her soul! What will you do?”
“Why, John, I'd turn Gentile,” he said, with terrible softness. It was a softness that scorned Shefford for asking, and likewise it flung defiance at his creed and into the face of hell.
Shefford felt the sting and the exaltation.
“And I'd be a Mormon,” he said.
“All right. We understand each other. Reckon there won't be any call for such extremes. I haven't an idea what you mean--what can be done. But I say, go slow, so we won't all find graves. First cheer her up somehow. Make her want to live. But go slow, John. AND DON'T BE WITH HER LATE!”
That night Shefford found her waiting for him in the moonlight--a girl who was as transparent as crystal-clear water, who had left off the somber gloom with the black hood, who tremulously embraced happiness without knowing it, who was one moment timid and wild like a half-frightened fawn, and the next, exquisitely half-conscious of what it meant to be thought dead, but to be alive, to be awakening, wondering, palpitating, and to be loved.
Shefford lived the hour as a dream and went back to the quiet darkness under the cedars to lie wide-eyed, trying to recall all that she had said. For she had talked as if utterance had long been dammed behind a barrier of silence.
There followed other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so sweet they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the nobler stride of a spirit that more every day lightened her burden.
The thing he had to do, sooner or later, was to tell her he knew she was Fay Larkin, not dead, but alive, and that, not love nor religion, but sacrifice, nailed her down to her martyrdom. Many and many a time he had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail. He hated to risk ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers. It might not be soon won back--perhaps never. How could he tell what chains bound her? And so as he vacillated between Joe's cautious advice to go slow and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.
One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might come, surely would come, some night. Shefford could bear it. But what would that visit do to Fay Larkin? Shefford instinctively feared the awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.
He might have spared himself needless torture. One day Joe Lake eyed him with penetrating glance.
“Reckon you don't have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail,” said the Mormon, significantly.
Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face. He had pulled his tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to the keen Mormon.
“Why?” asked Shefford.
“There won't be any Mormons riding in here soon--by night--to visit the women,” replied Joe, bluntly. “Haven't you figured there might be government spies watching the trails?”
“No, I haven't.”
“Well, take a hunch, then,” added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone to Stonebridge. Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported every trail free of watchers! There was no sign of any spies, cowboys, outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley. A passionate gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly. But, something hammered into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he help being jealous?
The result of Joe's hint was that Shefford put off the hour of revelation, lived in his dream, helped the girl grow farther and farther away from her trouble, until that inevitable hour arrived when he was driven by accumulated emotion as much as the exigency of the case.
He had not often walked with her beyond the dark shade of the pinyons round the cottage, but this night, when he knew he must tell her, he led her away down the path, through the cedar grove to the west end of the valley where it was wild and lonely and sad and silent.
The moon was full and the great peaks were crowned as with snow. A coyote uttered his cutting cry. There were a few melancholy notes from a night bird of the stone walls. The air was clear and cold, with a tang of frost in it. Shefford gazed about him at the vast, uplifted, insulating walls, and that feeling of his which was more than a sense told him how walls like these and the silence and shadow and mystery had been nearly all of Fay Larkin's life. He felt them all in her.
He stopped out in the open, near the line where dark shadow of the wall met the silver moonlight on the grass, and here, by a huge flat stone where he had come often alone and sometimes with Ruth, he faced Fay Larkin in the spirit to tell her gently that he knew her, and sternly to force her secret from her.
“Am I your friend?” he began.
“Ah!--my only friend,” she said.
“Do you trust me, believe I mean well by you, want to help you?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Well, then, let me speak of you. You know one topic we've never touched upon. You!”
She was silent, and looked wonderingly, a little fearfully, at him, as if vague, disturbing thoughts were entering the fringe of her mind.
“Our friendship is a strange one, is it not?” he went on.
“How do I know? I never had any other friendship. What do you mean by strange?”
“Well, I'm a young man. You're a--a married woman. We are together a good deal--and like to be.”
“Why is that strange?” she asked.
Suddenly Shefford realized that there was nothing strange in what was natural. A remnant of sophistication clung to him and that had spoken. He needed to speak to her in a way which in her simplicity she would understand.
“Never mind strange. Say that I am interested in you, and, as you're not happy, I want to help you. And say that your neighbors are curious and oppose my idea. Why do they?”
“They're jealous and want you themselves,” she replied, with sweet directness. “They've said things I don't understand. But I felt they--they hated in me what would be all right in themselves.”
Here to simplicity she added truth and wisdom, as an Indian might have expressed them. But shame was unknown to her, and she had as yet only vague perceptions of love and passion. Shefford began to realize the quickness of her mind, that she was indeed awakening.
“They are jealous--were jealous before I ever came here. That's only human nature. I was trying to get to a point. Your neighbors are curious. They oppose me. They hate you. It's all bound up in the--the fact of your difference from them, your youth, beauty, that you're not a Mormon, that you nearly betrayed their secret at the trial in Stonebridge.”
“Please--please don't--speak of that!” she faltered.
“But I must,” he replied, swiftly. “That trial was a torture to you. It revealed so much to me.... I know you are a sealed wife. I know there has been a crime. I know you've sacrificed yourself. I know that love and religion have nothing to do with--what you are.... Now, is not all that true?”
“I must not tell,” she whispered.
“But I shall MAKE you tell,” he replied, and his voice rang.
“Oh no, you cannot,” she said.
“I can--with just one word!”
Her eyes were great, starry, shadowy gulfs, dark in the white beauty of her face. She was calm now. She had strength. She invited him to speak the word, and the wistful, tremulous quiver of her lips was for his earnest thought of her.
“Wait--a--little,” said Shefford, unsteadily. “I'll come to that presently. Tell me this--have you ever thought of being free?”
“Free!” she echoed, and there was singular depth and richness in her voice. That was the first spark of fire he had struck from her. “Long ago, the minute I was unwatched, I'd have leaped from a wall had I dared. Oh, I wasn't afraid. I'd love to die that way. But I never dared.”
“Why?” queried Shefford, piercingly.
She was silent then.
“Suppose I offered to give you freedom that meant life?”
“I--couldn't--take it.”
“Why?”
“Oh, my friend, don't ask me any more.”
“I know, I can see--you want to tell me--you need to tell.”
“But I daren't.”
“Won't you trust me?”
“I do--I do.”
“Then tell me.”
“No--no--oh no!”
The moment had come. How sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them. What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard, fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and his eyes dimmed.
“What did I come to this country for?” he asked, suddenly, in ringing, powerful voice.
“To find a girl,” she whispered.
“I've found her!”
She began to shake. He saw a white hand go to her breast.
“Where is Surprise Valley?... How were you taken from Jane Withersteen and Lassiter?... I know they're alive. But where?”
She seemed to turn to stone.
“Fay!--FAY LARKIN!... I KNOW YOU!” he cried, brokenly.
She slipped off the stone to her knees, swayed forward blindly with her hands reaching out, her head falling back to let the moon fall full upon the beautiful, snow-white, tragically convulsed face.
