She held out her hand and he bent awkwardly over it. Very softly he pressed his lips upon the little pink palm. Then he stood erect, still holding the fluttering fingers in both his bronzed hands.
"Yuh will neveh know what yuh've been to me," he said, gravely, "and what yuh will always be to me still. It's goin' to hurt a little, of course; but I'll have my dreams, and that's something. And I'm shore yuah friend as you said. Gawd make yuh happy!"
Then he went quietly out, carefully closing the door behind him. The girl waited until the last echo of his firm steps had died away. Then she sat down beside the table, laid her face on her arms and cried bitterly.
It never occurred to either of them that he had made no reference to her engagement to Douglass, whose severance he could not possibly have known except by deduction.
The next afternoon he drove her over to a point where the stage could be intercepted without going to Tin Cup. She desired to avoid the possibility of a chance meeting with Constance Brevoort or Douglass, despite an almost irresistible temptation to see him for the last time. In ten days more she was aboard an ocean liner, her mother unquestioningly complying with her request for a continental tour, wisely leaving the girl to her own time in the matter of explanations. Besides, she had adroitly drawn out of Robert enough to confirm her suspicions, and she was unqualifiedly glad to encourage any distractions for the pale girl whose eyes were heavy with misery. As Grace expressed no preference she decided on Egypt, and the departure was made without unnecessary loss of time.
Had Grace gone direct to Tin Cup that day, instead of intercepting the stage some twenty miles out, or if the driver had been a more loquacious man than "Timberline," she would have been spared many heartaches at the price of a sickening terror. For the day before, the man that she loved, bleeding and senseless, had been carried into the hotel at Tin Cup, where a white-faced, wild-eyed woman sat by his bedside waiting the arrival of the doctor, stonily facing a despair too great for words.
With the firm intention of riding out to the C Bar that afternoon to make a last appeal to Grace for forgiveness and reconciliation, Douglass had rather reluctantly accompanied Constance for her morning's constitutional on horseback. Divining his intention in some mysterious manner known only to the loving jealous, she had determined to frustrate his purpose by making her ride unusually long, thus keeping him with her until too late to reach the C Bar that night. She was fighting for time, and every moment of delay was vital, she having been informed of the intended departure of Grace within the next few days. If she could manage to prevent their meeting before that time the chasm between the two would become permanently unbridgable.
Some ten miles out of town, in a magnificent cañon, reachable only by a somewhat difficult trail, was an exquisite little spot well known to both. It was one of their favorite rendezvous in the trout-fishing season, where they stopped to fry the delicious fish and boil the coffee indispensable to an al fresco luncheon. Hither, too, they had come on other innumerable occasions when absolute privacy was the desire of both, and it was to this place of tender associations and more or less compelling memories that she diplomatically led the way. Here, in the great outdoor temple of this pantheist's loving, with no other goddess to divert him from her own homage, was the place of all places to regain her fast waning influence over him. If she could only hold him for a little time longer success was assured.
Cleverly disregarding his taciturnity she kept up a merry chatter as they rode along, finally drawing him skillfully into a discussion of the geological features of the interesting region which they were slowly traversing; like every mining expert he was a bit professionally pedantic on this subject, and to this woman of abnormally clear perceptions it was a positive pleasure to him to impart the really great information with which his mind was stored. Once she got him warmed up to his subject he waxed enthusiastic in his dissertation on dykes, fissures, blanket veins and the like, even riding out of their course to point out confirming formations and collect specimens of their characteristic components. By the time they reached the embowered little glade in the cañon his sullenness was completely dissipated, and he kissed her very passionately as he lifted her from her horse. There was much of the old fire in him as she clung distractingly about his neck, and her eyes gleamed with triumph.
So absorbed had they become in each other that neither noticed the slinking figure which stole out of the glade at the sound of their approach, or the charcoal of a hastily-extinguished fire swirling in the eddies of the little pool. And mercifully they did not know, as they stood there in close-held rapture, drinking with clinging lips the Lethe of all things save love, that twenty feet away, from the vantage of a dense clematis tangle veiling a clump of dwarf box-elder, a pair of evil eyes burned above a snarling mouth, as a grimy hand drew cautiously back the firing bolt of a Mauser.