Coats read them, Ann's few blotted sentences first. It was Ann's struggle over her letter to Garvin, a beginning put aside because it was so ill-written and blotted:
"Dear Garvin:
"If I could endure any longer without telling you, I'd not write this, but I can't. You have asked me all along in your letters why I have written so anxiously, and I have told you that I wasn't happy because I was worried about everything, but I didn't tell you the real reason."
Coats read it, then passed from letter to letter, his brows lowering more and more ominously, his eyes graying to steel as he noted such sentences as these: "Why do you let your mind dwell on the possibility of trouble—we are going away so soon, Ann—in less than a month we'll be together. I'm going to live to make you happy, then." And in another letter there was the underlined sentence, "You are mine, now, every bit of you—there can be no going back for either of us;" and in the same letter "... if we are careful, there is no danger of any one's knowing how much we are to each other. And it will only be for a short time—I have the agency at last—we will go in June." Coats understood as neither Ann nor Sue had understood the omissions in the picture of their life together with which Garvin had closed his letter. He understood perfectly what was in Garvin's mind. He knew what Garvin was, as Sue could not know. The men on the Ridge knew Garvin Westmore; he was an open secret.
When Coats put down the last letter and sat looking at the collected evidences of sensual infatuation and very evident suffering, a sort of madness that could not be given the name of love, he was without even the faint doubt that had given Sue a ray of hope. There might be girls who had either the coolness or the hardihood to pass through a siege such as this unscathed. Or the occasional girl who, though capable of arousing mad passions, remains aloof, wrapped in a self-sufficient self-respect that makes her invincible. But it was not his reading of the child who had grown up without anybody's particular care. He had said to Sue, "She's bound to have her bit of life, have it and pay for it." It had come sooner and more terribly than he had feared. Coats thought of Ann when she was a little thing, just able to walk across the floor, her steps, as always, leading her to him, and his face twisted in pain.
Sue had watched him. "Coats, you think it's so?" she asked despairingly.
"Yes," he said.
"What are you goin' to do?" she whispered.
Coats got up and gathered the letters together. "I'm going to find her first.... You go, Sue, and see if she's in sight anywhere. Then come and tell me."
He wanted those few minutes alone. He went up to his room and, from a shelf in the cupboard, took his pistol, loaded it and put it in his pocket. When Sue came back, he was again where she had left him, his hat on and binding the letters together. He put them in his pocket.
"I don't see her, Coats.... You have your hat—what are you goin' to do?" Sue could not rid herself of the terror his grim look inspired.