“No,” he flared up. “Friend Virginia has quit me, along with─”

“Why, Wiley!” cried Virginia, and he started and fell silent as he met her reproachful gaze. For 298the sake of the Colonel they were supposed to be lovers, whose quarrel had been happily made up, but this was very unloverlike.

“Well, I don’t deserve it,” he muttered at last, “but friend Virginia has promised to stay with me.”

“Yes, I’m going to stay with him,” spoke up Virginia quickly, “because it was all my fault. I’m going to go with him, father, wherever he goes and─”

“God bless you, my daughter!” said the Colonel, smiling proudly, “and never forget you’re a Huff!”

299CHAPTER XXXIII
The Fiery Furnace

To be a Huff, of course, was to be brave and true and never go back on a friend; but as the Colonel that evening began to speak on the subject, Virginia crept off to bed. She was tired from her night trip across the Sink of Death Valley, with only Crazy Charley for a guide; but it was Wiley, the inexorable, who drove her off weeping, for he would not take her hand. His mind was still fixed on the Gethsemane of the soul that he had gone through in Blount’s bank at Vegas, and strive as she would she could not bring him back to play his poor part as lover. Whether she loved him or not was not the question–not even if she was willing to throw away her life by following him in his wanderings. Three times he had trusted her and three times she had played him false–and was that the honor of the Huffs?

She was penitent now and, in the presence of her father, more gentle and womanly than seemed possible; but next week or next month or in the long years to come, was she the woman he could trust? They passed before his eyes in a swift series of images, the days when he had trusted her 300before; and always, behind her smile, there was something else, something cold and calculating and unkind. Her eyes were soft now, and gentle and imploring, but they had looked at him before with scorn and hateful laughter, when he had staked his soul on her word. He had trusted her–too far–and before Blount and all his sycophants she had made him a mock and a reviling.

The Colonel was talking, for his mood was expansive, but at last he fell silent and waited.