“But what I can’t make out, Hector,” she said, “is where you got that money. Why don’t you talk out the way a husband should to a wife? Here we’ve been living so close to the wind that we hadn’t enough to satisfy us, and Hannah’s been going without enough to clothe her decently. Now, of a sudden, your pockets are full of money! What does it mean, Hector? And why did you clear out of Lee in the night? When you gave the word to go I was feeling so dull in my head that I didn’t care whether the thing was right or wrong. But now I seem to have come to life. I’ve got to thinking again, like I was a real human being. And Hector—”
Her voice carried on the air with the wild note of a loon.
“Hector!”
“Well, ma, go on, for goodness sake.”
“How did it come that you got that money just when Simeon Pace’s money disappeared? Tell me that, husband! Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it! My life’s been queer and dark, but it’s been honest. You’ve turned out a different man from what I thought you’d be. I hoped on and on for you, but you didn’t get anywhere, and I got worn out and took to my bed and meant never to get out of it. But even when you’d taken all the spunk out of me I never thought you was anything but honest. Are you, Hector? Are you honest—or a thief?”
It wrung Summers’ heart; yet he knew that the time had come for judgment. He had been a boy of wild pranks and he loved a prank still. An idea came flashing into his head. He crept back to his horse, loosened one of the megaphones and put it to his mouth, and in that voice which had electrified great camp meetings, magnified many times by the horn, he bellowed into the mist:
“Disbrow, thief! Give back the money you stole! Make restitution! Return the money of the orphan! Simeon Pace is in his grave, and his orphan’s money is in your pocket! Disbrow, thief!”
The great megaphone waved up and down in the air, and the accusing voice was borne to the group around the fire, as if carried on winds from the furthermost heaven. In the white gloom, with the wreathing wraiths of the mist dancing about them, the dark cavern below, the sighing trees above, the monstrous voice, like that of an angry angel, besieged their ears. Summers was too far from them to see them cower, and he could not see their stricken faces. His heart secretly misgave him for what he might be doing to the woman and the girl, but he did not flinch for all that. He gave out one last call:
“Make restitution! To-morrow at sunrise set out upon your journey. Do not pause till wrong has been made right. This is the first warning. Beware the second!”
The mountain echoes caught it up and shouted the words back, while up and down the chasm below the roadway the mist figures writhed and climbed. Summers mounted his horse and stole back the way he had come till he reached the bottom of the gulch, then taking the path on the other side of it, he proceeded on his way. It was almost dawn when he drew rein, tethered his horse, and laid him down to sleep.