“Take your congratulations with you to—where you’ll end,” said Ned Gunliffe.
Steve laughed again. “To where I’ll end? So the game’s not played out with me yet. Perhaps you plan the wedding day for the day I’m hanged. But I may cheat you yet, Ned, and live to send you a wedding present. A neat design, say, of hands clasped through a hangman’s noose.”
“Let us go,” said Ess in low tones to Ned Gunliffe. She felt weak and exhausted, and near the point of breaking down.
“Or, perhaps,” said Steve, “you would prefer me to wait here till you can make sure of me. Are the troopers waiting below, may I ask?”
Ned Gunliffe turned his head. “You are free to go—for all of us,” he flung back.
“Thank you,” said Steve. “Fortunate for me, I suppose, that we were not married. The gallows would have been needed then to free her, and you’d have brought the troopers with you.”
They went down the hill together, leaving him still standing there, laughing softly, but horribly.
CHAPTER XIV.
The two went back to where they had left the horses, and mounted and rode back in the rapidly growing light without speaking any word, and it was not till they were descending the slope of the Ridge to the houses that Ess broke the silence.