“Oh! Oh!” she murmured, her dark eyes expanding. “Then I haven’t been wrong—Harfy has cared for me in secret all along?”
She knelt down beside the fallen family friend; hovered over him in an egoistic ecstasy.
“Poor dar-rling—how you must have loved me to have hidden it so well! And all the time I thought that you—Oh, it is thrilling that you should have pretended to regard another, when in reality your grande passione was for me alone! If you’d been killed, I never could have forgiven myself—that is, I couldn’t if I had found out afterwards. When I think what you must have suffered, I wonder how I ever can repay——”
“You’ve got a darn’ good chance right here and now,” interrupted Pape, as a finishing touch to his ruse for punishing them and cutting-out Jane from the “bunch.” “He’s coming around fast—ain’t in any physical danger if his heart is cheered up. ’Tis better far for him that you two shouldest be alone when he comes clean to. You stay here and nurse him—you owe him at least that much. When he’s able to ride make for the bridle path and home. The black is quieting down. You can catch him without trouble. And don’t be afraid of pouring out your love and affection upon the poor man. It is your bounden duty as a woman and a vamp. Love may save his life.”
“But you, Why Not?”
A sudden fear lest she lose the old in the new acquirement strained her face.
“I’ll bear up some way. I, too, still have my health and strength.” He tried to mask his triumph in a dark, desperate frown. “Come, Jane. You and I are no longer needed here.”
He forestalled protest by remounting; gave the older girl a half-humorous, wholly-apologetic look; led the way toward the heights.
Five minutes later they dropped rein in a clump of warty-ridged hackberry bushes and started on afoot. On the way he made succinct report of his discovery during the pursuit of the red. At that, he had not prepared her—indeed, was far from prepared himself—for what they soon saw from cover at the edge of the mesa.
The stage was set as on his dash across it in pursuit of the run-amuck. But the actors—half a dozen in number, inclusive of Swinton Welch, and none in laborer’s garb—were now grouped about one of the supply carts. Attention centered upon a man who sat the tail of this cart—one who had not been about during Pape’s preview. His pudgy hands held open before him a sheet of paper from which he was reading aloud.