“You’ve got the right idea,” said Custer. “There isn’t a rancher or an orchardist, big or little, in the valley who couldn’t make more money year in and year out if he’d keep a few brood sows.”
“What’s Cus doing?” asked Eva, who had reined back beside them. “Preaching hog raising again? That’s his idea of a dapper little way to entertain a girl—hogs, Herefords and horses! Wouldn’t he make a hit in society? Regular little tea pointer, I’ll say!”
“I knew you were about to say something,” remarked her brother. “You’ve been quiet for all of five minutes.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Eva. “I’ve been thinking how lonely it will be when you have to go away to jail.”
“Why, they can’t send me to jail—I haven’t done anything,” he tried to reassure her.
“I’m so afraid, Cus!” The tears came to her eyes. “I lay awake for hours last night, thinking about it. Oh, Cus, I just couldn’t stand it if they sent you to jail! Do you think the men who did it would let you go for something they did? Could any one be so wicked? I never hated any one in my life, but I could hate them, if they don’t come forward and save you. I could hate them, hate them, hate them! Oh, Cus, I believe that I could kill the man who would do such a thing to my brother!”
“Come, dear, don’t worry about it. The chances are that they’ll free me. Even if they don’t, you mustn’t feel quite so bitterly against the men who are responsible. There may be reasons that you know nothing of that would keep them silent. Let’s not talk about it. All we can do now is to wait and see what the grand jury is going to do. In the meantime I don’t intend to worry.”
Shannon Burke, her heart heavy with shame and sorrow, listened as might a condemned man to the reading of his death sentence. She felt almost the degradation that might have been hers had she deliberately planned to ensnare Custer Pennington in the toils that had been laid for him.
She determined that she would go before the grand jury and tell all she knew. Then she would go away. She would not have to see the contempt and hatred they must surely feel for her after she had recited the cold facts that she must lay before the jury, unmitigated by any of those extenuating truths that must lie forever hidden in the secret recesses of her soul. They would know only that she might have warned Custer, and did not; that she might have cleared him at his preliminary hearing, and did not. The fact that she had come to his rescue at the eleventh hour would not excuse her, in their minds, of the guilt of having permitted the Pennington honor to be placed in jeopardy needlessly; nor could it explain her knowledge of the crime, or those associations of her past life that had made it possible for her to have gained such knowledge.
No, she could never face them again after the following Wednesday; but until then she would cling to the brief days of happiness that remained to her before the final catastrophe of her life, for it was thus that she thought of it—the moment and the act that would forever terminate her intercourse with the Penningtons, that would turn the respect of the man she loved to loathing.