Varley was white. He had been leading his horse and talking to Finden. He mounted quickly now, and was about to ride away, but stopped short again. “Who knows—who knows the truth?” he asked.
“Father Bourassa and me—no others,” he answered. “I knew Meydon thirty years ago.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Varley said, hoarsely, “Tell me—tell me all.”
When all was told, he turned his horse toward the wide waste of the prairie, and galloped away. Finden watched him till he was lost to view beyond the bluff.
“Now, a man like that, you can’t guess what he’ll do,” he said, reflectively. “He’s a high-stepper, and there’s no telling what foolishness will get hold of him. It’d be safer if he got lost on the prairie for twenty-four hours. He said that Meydon’s only got twenty-four hours, if the trick isn’t done! Well—”
He took a penny from his pocket. “I’ll toss for it. Heads he does it, and tails he doesn’t.”
He tossed. It came down heads. “Well, there’s one more fool in the world than I thought,” he said, philosophically, as though he had settled the question; as though the man riding away into the prairie with a dark problem to be solved had told the penny what he meant to do.
Mrs. Meydon, Father Bourassa, and Finden stood in the little waiting-room of the hospital at Jansen, one at each window, and watched the wild thunderstorm which had broken over the prairie. The white heliographs of the elements flashed their warnings across the black sky, and the roaring artillery of the thunder came after, making the circle of prairie and tree and stream a theatre of anger and conflict. The streets of Jansen were washed with flood, and the green and gold things of garden and field and harvest crumbled beneath the sheets of rain.
The faces at the window of the little room of the hospital, however, were but half-conscious of the storm; it seemed only an accompaniment of their thoughts, to typify the elements of tragedy surrounding them.