“Leave him alone,” he said—“leave him to me. I know him. You hear? Ain’t I no rights? I tell you I knew him—South. You leave him to me.”
They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away. They watched the figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.
“Tim’ll go to her,” one said, “and perhaps they’ll let the snake get off. Hadn’t we best make sure?”
“Perhaps you’d better let him vamoose,” said Flood Rawley, anxiously. “Jansen is a law-abiding place.”
The reply was decisive. Jansen had its honor to keep. It was the home of the Pioneers—Laura Sloly was a Pioneer.
Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the word, and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman and can never see another—not the product of the most modern civilization. Before Laura had had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had waited and hoped ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said to him before Mary Jewell’s house that she was in love with the Faith Healer, nothing changed in him. For the man—for Ingles—Tim belonged to a primitive breed, and love was not in his heart. As he rode out to Sloly’s Ranch, he ground his teeth in rage. But Laura had called him to her, and—
“Well, what you say goes, Laura,” he muttered at the end of a long hour of human passion and its repression. “If he’s to go scot-free, then he’s got to go; but the boys yonder’ll drop on me if he gets away. Can’t you see what a swab he is, Laura?”
The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently. The struggle between them was over; she had had her way—to save the preacher, impostor though he was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the same fashion, that this man was a man of men.
“Tim, you do not understand,” she urged. “You say he was a landsharp in the South, and that he had to leave—”