“I know it, I know it!” she confessed in bitterness, “I knew it when he took me away from those people in the mountains and brought me home. He carried me in his arms when I was tired, and sang to me as 273 we rode along there in the lonesome night! He sang to me, just like I was a little child, so I wouldn’t be afraid—afraid—of him!”
“Oh, and you struck him, you struck him like a dog!”
“I’ve suffered more for that than I hurt him, Frances—it’s been like fire in my heart!”
“I pray to God it will burn up your wicked pride!”
“We believed him, mother and I believed him, in spite of what Chance said. Oh, if you’d only come back then, Frances, this thing wouldn’t have happened!”
“I can’t see what good that would have done,” said Frances, wearily; “there are others who don’t believe him. They’d have got him some time, just like they got him—in a coward’s underhanded way, never giving him a chance for his life.”
“We went to Meander this morning thinking we’d catch father there before he left. We wanted to tell him about Mr. Macdonald, and get him to drop this feud. If we could have seen him I know he’d have done what we asked, for he’s got the noblest heart in the world!”
Whatever Frances felt on the noble nature of Saul Chadron she held unexpressed. She did not feel that it fell to her duty to tell Nola whose hand had struck Macdonald down, although she believed that the cattleman’s daughter deserved whatever pain and humiliation the revelation might bring. For it was 274 as plain as if Nola had confessed it in words that she had much more than a friendly feeling of gratitude for the foeman of her family.
Her heart was as unstable as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was free to take him and make the most of him. But she was not to come in as a wedge to rive her from this man.
Let her pay her debt of gratitude in something else than love. Living or dead, Alan Macdonald was not for Nola Chadron. Her penance and her tears, her meanings and sobs and her broken heart, even that, if it should come, could not pay for the humiliation and the pain which that house had brought upon him.