He shook his head, his eye traveling down a new letter he had picked up from the desk.
“Good night,” she said, moving toward the door.
He dropped the letter and, following her, put his arm around her and kissed her. It was an unexpected caress. He and his daughter had grown very far apart in this last year.
“Good-by,” he said gently, and turning from her went back to his papers.
“Run along,” he said without looking up. “I’ll be busy here for some hours yet.”
When she came down to breakfast the next morning he had already gone. The Chinaman told her he had left early, driving into Reno by private conveyance in order to catch the first morning train to the coast.
That evening Jerry beat out the last spark of her resistance. He held her close in his arms, his cheek against hers, and revealed to her his plan of elopement. Trembling and sobbing she clung to him, under his kisses the words of denial dying on her lips. He paid no heed to her feeble pleadings, hushing her protests with caresses, whispering of their happiness, murmuring the lovers’ sentences that, since Eve, have been the undoing of impassioned women.
When he stole down the steps in the darkness of the early night, triumph was in his heart. She was his when he chose to take her, her will as water, her resistance only words. A new world of love, liberty and riches lay before him. The bleak town and its bitter memories would soon be far behind, and June and he in a strange country and a new life would begin their dream of love.
CHAPTER VII
THE COLONEL COMES BACK
Jerry’s plans had been laid with the utmost secrecy and care. It behooved him to be wary, for he knew that detection would mean death. Neither the Colonel nor Black Dan would have hesitated to shoot him like a dog if they had known what he contemplated, and working day by day in an office with these men, in a town the smallness and isolation of which rendered every human figure a segregated and important unit, it required all the shrewdness of which he was master to mature his design and arouse no suspicion.