“All right,” said Joe.
“No hard feelin’s left behind me?” facing Joe again with his old, self-assured smile. He offered his hand, but Joe did not take it.
“As long as you never come back,” said Joe.
Morgan walked to the fence, his head bent, thoughtfully. Joe followed, as if to satisfy himself that the wily agent was not going to work some subterfuge, having small faith in his promise to leave, much less in the probability that he would stay away.
Joe stood at the fence, looking after Morgan, long after the dust of his wheels had settled again to the road. At last he went back to the place where he had dropped his scythe, and cut a swath straight through to the tree where Ollie’s bonnet had hung. And there he mowed the trampled clover, and obliterated her footprints with his own.
The weight of his discovery was like some dead thing on his breast. He felt that Ollie had fallen from the high heaven of his regard, never to mount to her place again. But Isom did not know of this bitter thing, this shameful shadow at his door. As far as it rested with him to hold the secret in his heart, poison though it was to him, Isom should never know.
CHAPTER VI
BLOOD
Joe had debated the matter fully in his mind before going in to supper. Since he had sent her tempter away, there was no necessity of taking Ollie to task, thus laying bare his knowledge of her guilty secret. He believed that her conscience would prove its own flagellant in the days to come, when she had time to reflect and repent, away from the debauching influence of the man who had led her astray. His blame was all for Morgan, who had taken advantage of her loneliness and discontent.
Joe now recalled, and understood, her reaching out to him for sympathy; he saw clearly that she had demanded something beyond the capacity of his unseasoned heart to give. Isom was to blame for that condition of her mind, first and most severely of all. If Isom had been kind to her, and given her only a small measure of human sympathy, she would have clung to him, and rested in the shelter of his protection, content against all the world. Isom had spread the thorns for his own feet, in his insensibility to all human need of gentleness.