June stood for a moment looking after them, then turned to where the town sparkled in descending tiers of streets. Its noise came to her ears, the hum of human voices, and suddenly the misery that had held her in a state of broken acquiescence all day, that had been growing in her for weeks, rose into a climax of terrified revolt. The full horror of her action burst upon her. In a flash of revelation she saw it clearly, unblinded by passion. Her repulsion toward Jerry’s wooing surged up in her in a frantic desire to escape, to get away from him. She feared him, she longed to creep away and hide from him—the terrible Jerry, her merciless master, before whom she cowered and trembled.
She cast a fearful look into the darkness behind her and made out the shape of the buggy just turning for the backward trip. It would be beside her again in a few minutes. In front, stretching to the town, the road lay dark and deserted. She gripped her bag and started out toward the blinking lights, running at first, lightly and noiselessly on the trodden vegetation that edged the path.
Her engrossing thought was that she might meet Jerry. In the condition of nervous exhaustion to which the long strain of the past months had reduced her, she had lost all confidence in her power to direct her own actions, and resist the dominating man who had had her so completely under his control. If she met him now it would be the end. He would not cajole and kiss her. He would order her into the buggy and ride away with her into the night.
Several times she met men, dark figures against the lights beyond. At the first glance she could see by their build or gait that they were not Jerry. One, of lighter mold and more elastic walk, caused her to pause for a stricken moment and then shrink back in the shadow of a cabin till she saw her fears were unfounded. As the lights grew brighter and she entered the sparsely settled end of C Street, she slackened her speed and gazed ahead, alertly wary. She did not see but that he must come this way, unless he chose the longer and more secluded route, among the miners’ lodging houses and cabins, climbing up from there to the road above.
She had started to return without any fixed idea of her goal. As she advanced she thought of this and immediately the Colonel arose to her mind as a rock behind which there was shelter, his lodgings as the one place where she would find protection. In the bewilderment of her mind she forgot that he was not due to return yet, only remembering his original statement that he would be back on Friday night. If she could reach his rooms without meeting Jerry she would be safe. She felt like a child who has run away to find adventures and is suddenly stricken with the horror of strangeness and the wild and piercing longing for the familiar things of home.
The evening turmoil of C Street had begun. Looking up its length, roofed by its wooden arcade, was like looking into a lighted tunnel, swaying with heads. The glare from the show-windows, the lights from lamps, and the agitated flaring of lanterns on the street hawkers’ barrows, were concentrated within this echoing tunnel and played on every variety of face, as the crowd came sweeping down on June. It seemed to catch her in its eddies and whirl her forward, a dark shape, furtive-eyed and stealthy-footed in the fierce, bubbling buoyancy of the throng, silent amid its hubbub.
There seemed to her more noise to-night, more of a seething, whirling froth of excitement than she had ever noticed before. She thought it a reflection of her own fever and hurried on, her eyes gleaming through her veil in peering looks sent ahead for Jerry. She was nearing the short street which led down to the Cresta Plata, when from two miners, almost running past her, she heard his name. Her heart leaped, and for a second she flinched and shrank back into the doorway. As she stood there a group of men brushed by in the opposite direction and from these, as they paused for a second at her side, she heard a question and answer:
“How did he come to fall? Did he slip?”
“Yes, on the iron plates. He stepped back and then slipped, and before Black Dan could get him he was gone. It was all done in a minute.”
“Lord!” came the ejaculation in a tone of horror.