THE BECOMING END
"Why did you interfere?" when at last he got his breath again, asked Newbold of Maitland who still held him firmly although restraint was now unnecessary, the heat and fire of his passion being somewhat gone out of him. "I meant to kill him."
"He'd oughter die sure nuff," drawled old Kirkby, rising from where he had been kneeling by Armstrong's side, "but I don't know's how you're bound to be his executioner. He's all right now, Miss Enid," said the old man. "Here"—he took a pillow from the bunk and slipped it under his head and then extending his hands he lifted the excited almost distraught woman to her feet—"tain't fittin' for you to tend on him."
"Oh," exclaimed Enid, her limbs trembling, the blood flowing away from her heart, her face deathly white, fighting against the faintness that came with the reaction, while old Kirkby supported and encouraged her. "I thank God you came. I don't know what would have happened if you had not."
"Has this man mistreated you?" asked Robert Maitland, suddenly tightening his grip upon his hard breathing but unresisting passive prisoner.
"No, no," answered his niece. "He has been everything that a man should be."
"And Armstrong?" continued her uncle.
"No, not even he."
"I came in time, thank God!" ejaculated Newbold.
By this time Armstrong had recovered consciousness. To his other causes for hatred were now added chagrin, mortification, shame. He had been overcome. He would have been a dead man and by Newbold's hands if the others had not interfered. He almost wished they had let his enemy alone. Well, he had lost everything but a chance for revenge on them all.
"She has been alone here with this man in this cabin for a month," he said thickly. "I was willing to take her in spite of that, but—"
"He made that damned suggestion before," cried Newbold, his rage returning. "I don't know who you are—"
"My name is Robert Maitland, and I am this girl's uncle."
"Well, if you were her father, I could only swear—"
"It isn't necessary to swear anything," answered Maitland serenely. "I know this child. And I believe I'm beginning to find out this man."
"Thank you, Uncle Robert," said Enid gratefully, coming nearer to him as she spoke. "No man could have done more for me than Mr. Newbold has, and no one could have been more considerate of me. As for you," she turned on, Armstrong, who now slowly got to his feet, "your insinuations against me are on a par with your charges against the dead woman, beneath contempt."
"What did he say about her?" asked Old Kirkby.
"You know my story?" asked Newbold.
"Yes."
"He said that my wife had been unfaithful to me—with him—and that he had refused to take her back."
"And it was true," snarled Armstrong.
It was all Maitland could do to check Newbold's rush, but in the end it was old Kirkby who most effectively interposed.
"That's a damned lie," he said quietly with his usual drawling voice.
"You can say so," laughed Armstrong, "but that doesn't alter the facts."
"An' I can prove it," answered the old man triumphantly.
It was coming, the secret that she had tried to conceal was about to be revealed, thought Enid. She made a movement toward the old man. She opened her mouth to bid him be silent and then stopped. It would be useless she knew. The determination was no longer hers. The direction of affairs had been withdrawn from her. After all it was better that the unloving wife should be proved faithful, even if her husband's cherished memory of her love for him had to be destroyed thereby. Helpless she listened knowing full well what the old frontiersman's next word would be.
"Prove it!" mocked Armstrong. "How?"
"By your own hand, out of your own mouth, you dog," thundered old Kirkby. "Miss Enid, w'ere are them letters I give you?"
"I—I—" faltered the girl, but there was no escape from the keen glance of the old man, her hand went to the bosom of her tunic.
"Letters!" exclaimed Armstrong. "What letters?"
"These," answered Enid Maitland, holding up the packet.
Armstrong reached for them but Kirkby again interposed.
"No, you don't," he said dryly. "Them ain't for your eyes yit. Mr. Newbold, I found them letters on the little shelf w'ere your wife first struck w'en she fell over onto the butte w'ere she died. I figgered out her dress was tore open there an' them letters she was carryin' fell out an' lodged there. We had ropes an' we went down over the rocks that way. I went first an' I picked 'em up. I never told nobody about it an' I never showed 'em to a single human bein' until I give 'em to Miss Maitland at the camp."
"Why not?" asked Newbold, taking the letters.
"There wasn't no good tellin' nobody then, jest fer the sake o' stirrin' up trouble."
"But why did you give them to her at last?"
"Because I was afeered she might fall in love with Armstrong. I supposed she'd know his writin', but w'en she didn't I jest let her keep 'em anyway. I knowed it'd all come out somehow; there is a God above us in spite of all the damned scoundrels on earth like this un."
"Are these letters addressed to my dead wife?" asked Newbold.
"They are," answered Enid Maitland; "look and see."
"And did Mr. Armstrong write them?"
"He'll deny it, I suppose," answered Kirkby.
"But I am familiar with his handwriting," said Maitland.
Taking the still unopened packet from Newbold he opened it, examined one of the letters and handed them all back.
"There is no doubt about it," he said. "It's Armstrong's hand, I'll swear to it."
"Oh, I'll acknowledge them," said Armstrong, seeing the absolute futility of further denial. He had forgotten all about the letters. He had not dreamed they were in existence. "You've got me beat between you, the cards are stacked against me, I've done my damndest—" and indeed that was true.
Well, he had played a great game, battling for a high stake he had stuck at nothing. A career in which some good had mingled with much bad was now at an end. He had lost utterly, would he show himself a good loser?
"Mr. Armstrong," said Newbold, quietly extending his hand, "here are your letters."
"What do you mean?"
"I am not in the habit of reading letters addressed to other people without permission and when the recipient of them is dead long since, I am doubly bound."
"You're a damned fool," cried Armstrong contemptuously.
"That kind of a charge from your kind of a man is perhaps the highest compliment you could pay me. I don't know whether I shall ever get rid of the doubt you have tried to lodge in my soul about my dead wife, but—"
"There ain't no doubt about it," protested old Kirkby earnestly. "I've read them letters a hundred times over, havin' no scruples whatsomever, an' in every one of 'em he was beggin' an' pleadin' with her to go away with him an' fightin' her refusal to do it. I guess I've got to admit that she didn't love you none, Newbold, an' she did love this here wuthless Armstrong, but for the sake of her reputation I'll prove to you all from them letters of hisn, from his own words, that there didn't live a cleaner hearted, more virtuous, upright feemale than that there wife of yourn, even if she didn't love you. It's God's truth an' you kin take it from me."
"Mr. Armstrong," cried Enid Maitland, interposing at this juncture, "not very long ago I told you I liked you better than any man I had ever seen, I thought perhaps I might have loved you, and that was true. You have played the coward's part and the liar's part in this room—"
"Did I fight him like a coward?" asked Armstrong.
"No," answered Newbold for her, remembering the struggle, "you fought like a man."
Singular perversion of language and thought there! If two struggled like wild beasts that was fighting like men!
"But let that pass," continued the woman. "I don't deny your physical courage, but I am going to appeal to another kind of a courage which I believe you possess. You have showed your evil side here in this room, but I don't believe that's the only side you have, else I couldn't even have liked you in the past. You have made a charge against two women, one dead and one living. It makes little difference what you say about me; I need no defense and no justification in the eyes of those here who love me and for the rest of the world I don't care. But you have slain this man's confidence in a woman he once loved, and whom he thought loved him. As you are a man, tell him that it was a lie and that she was innocent of anything else although she did love you."
What a singular situation, an observer who knew all might have reflected? Here was Enid Maitland pleading for the good name of the woman who had married the man she now loved, and whom by rights she should have jealously hated.
"You ask me more than I can," faltered Armstrong, yet greatly moved by this touching appeal to his better self.
"Let him speak no word," protested Newbold quickly. "I wouldn't believe him on his oath."
"Steady now, steady," interposed Kirkby with his frontier instinct for fair play. "The man's down, Newbold, don't hit him now."
"Give him a chance," added Maitland earnestly.
"You would not believe me, eh?" laughed Armstrong horribly; "well then this is what I say, whether it is true or a lie you can be the judge."
What was he about to say? They all recognized instinctively that his forthcoming deliverance would be a final one. Would good or evil dominate him now? Enid Maitland had made her plea and it had been a powerful one; the man did truly love the woman who urged him, there was nothing left for him but a chance that she should think a little better of him than he merited, he had come to the end of his resources. And Enid Maitland spoke again as he hesitated.
"Oh, think, think before you speak," she cried.
"If I thought," answered Armstrong quickly, "I should go mad. Newbold, your wife was as pure as the snow. That she loved me I cannot and will not deny. She married you in a fit of jealousy and anger after a quarrel between us in which I was to blame, and when I came back to the camp in your absence I strove to make it up and used every argument that I possessed to get her to leave you and to go with me. Although she had no love for you she was too good and too true a woman for that. Now you've got the truth, damn you; believe it or not as you like. Miss Maitland," he added swiftly, "if I had met you sooner, I might have been a better man. Good-by."
He turned suddenly and none preventing, indeed it was not possible, he ran to the outer door; as he did so his hand snatched something that lay on the chest of drawers. There was a flash of light as he drew in his arm but none saw what it was. In a few seconds he was outside the door. The table was between old Kirkby and the exit, Maitland and Newbold were nearest. The old man came to his senses first.
"After him," he cried, "he means—"
But before anybody could stir, the dull report of a pistol came through the open door!
They found Armstrong lying on his back in the snowy path, his face as white as the drift that pillowed his head, Newbold's heavy revolver still clutched in his right hand and a bloody, welling smudge on his left breast over his heart. It was the woman who broke the silence.
"Oh," she sobbed, "It can't be—"
"Dead," said Maitland solemnly.
"And it might have been by my hand," muttered Newbold to himself in horror.
"He'll never cause no more trouble to nobody in this world, Miss Enid an' gents," said old Kirkby gravely. "Well, he was a damned fool an' a damned villain in some ways," continued the old frontiersman reflectively in the silence broken otherwise only by the woman's sobbing breaths, "but he had some of the qualities that go to make a man, an' I ain't doubtin' but what them last words of hisn was mighty near true. Ef he had met a gal like you earlier in his life he mought have been a different man."