“Boyle!” Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. “He’s the man!”
“You take the name from my mouth,” she told him. “He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty.”
“It might be so here,” he admitted.
“I met Jerry Boyle about five years ago, when father was in Congress. His father was at that time Senator from this state. We lived in Washington, and Jerry Boyle was then considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coarseness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He passed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a butterfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I–I am afraid that I encouraged him to do it at first.
“But he drank and gambled, and got into brawls. He stabbed an attaché of the Mexican Legation over a woman, and the engagement to marry him which I had entered into was broken. I was foolish in the first instance, but I plead the mitigation of frivolity and 262 youth. My heart was not in it. I beg you to believe, Dr. Slavens, that my heart was not in it at all.”
She looked at him with pleading sincerity, and from her eyes his heart gathered its recesses full of joy.
“I need no further assurance of that,” he smiled.
“You are generous. It was on the afternoon of the day that followed your disappearance from Comanche that Boyle came into camp there. I had not forgotten him, of course, nor his influential position in this state; but I never thought of meeting him there. It was a sickening shock to me. I denied his protestations of acquaintanceship, but it passed off poorly with all of them who were present, except William Bentley, generous gentleman that he is.”
“He is so,” testified Slavens.
“I left Comanche because I was afraid of him, but he rode post the night that I engaged passage and beat me to Meander; but he wasn’t hurrying on my account, as you know. He tried to see me there in Meander, but I refused to meet him. The day before yesterday he came here and solicited my help in carrying out a scheme. I refused. He threatened me with exposure and arrest on account of false entry and affidavit.”