She started on and from a cluster of men standing in a saloon doorway she again heard his name. The perspiration broke out on her face. At the mouth of the lane that led to the Cresta Plata a crowd with restless edges, that moved down toward the hoisting works and swayed out into the roadway, made a black mass, expanding and decreasing as its members dispersed or drew together. It was too early for the day shift to be coming up, and she looked at it with sidelong alarm. It was part of the unusualness of this weird and awful night. And again as she threaded her way through the scattering of figures on its outskirts she heard his name, twice in the moment of passing.
What was the matter? Why were they all talking of him? The sense of horror that weighed on her seemed to increase until it became threatening and tragic. She felt as if she were in a nightmare, with the Colonel’s rooms and the Colonel the only place of safety and means of escape. She forgot to be cautious and started to run, pushing her way through the crowd, dodging round the edges of excited groups, brushing by knots of women collected at the foot of stairways, and from every group the name of Jerry followed her.
Suddenly, between the massed and moving figures she saw the glare of the colored bottles in the window of Caswell’s drug store. It was over this store that the Colonel lived. At one side, outside the brilliant radiance of the bottled transparencies, a small, dark door gave on the stairs that led to the floor above. From its central panel a bell-handle protruded. She tried the knob first and found that it yielded. Opening it softly she looked up the dim stairway and saw in the hall above a light burning. She ran up, her steps subdued on the worn carpet. A narrow corridor divided the floor, passing from a door that opened on the front balcony back to an anterior region where the landlady lived and let rooms to less illustrious lodgers. Of the two suites in the front that on the left was occupied by Rion Gracey, the other by the Colonel. June had often been in these rooms. She opened the door and looked in.
The door gave into the sitting-room, empty of occupants and unlit. But the Colonel’s landlady had not been advised of his change of plans, and in expectation of his return a fire burned in the grate and cast a warm, cheering light over the simple furnishings and the arm-chair drawn up in front of it. June crept in and shut the door. She fell into the arm-chair with her hands over her face and sat limp and motionless in the firelight. The noise of the town came dulled to her ears. She had escaped from Jerry and the pursuing echo of his name.
A half-hour later the Colonel found her there. After a hurried search for her through the town he had been seized by the hope that she might have sought shelter with him.
As the opening of the door fell on her ear she raised her head and looked up. He saw her in the firelight, all dark in the half-lit room, save for her white face and hands. An exclamation of passionate relief broke from him, and as she rose and ran to him he held out his arms and clasped her. They said nothing for a moment, clinging mutely together, her face buried in his shoulders, his hand pressing her head against his heart. Then she drew herself away from him and tried to tell him the story in a series of broken sentences, but he silenced her and put her back in the chair.
“Wait till to-morrow,” he said, kneeling down beside her to stir up the fire into a redder blaze. “You can tell it all to-morrow. And, anyway, there’s no necessity to tell it. I know it now.”
“Do you know what I was going to do—nearly did?”
“Yes, all about it. I got your letter.”
“Do you despise me?” she said faintly.