"Mary," I said, "do you remember how my father told Ellen and me to go back in a year and a day, and look in the boot?"
She nodded.
"Well," I said, "we went—hand in hand—and there was still a boot sticking out. And I climbed up, after several failures, and got it. It wasn't full of gold, but it did have two gold pieces in it. One each."
"What a memory your father had," said Mary: "he never forgot anything."
Later I was talking with Will alone, and I asked him why he had run away in the first place.
"Why," he said, "I had no chance with the law. The only outsiders who saw the shooting were friends of Hagan's; there was bad blood between us. They'd sworn to do for me. And they would. I shot Hagan with his own gun. He pulled it on me, and I turned it into him, by the greatest piece of quickness and good luck that ever I had. And somehow—somehow—I couldn't see myself swinging for that, or going to prison for life. And I saw my chance and took it. I told the whole thing to the minister that married us; he believed me, and so would any one that knew me then—except Hagan's friends, and whatever they believed they'd have sworn the opposite. Do you think your father thought I was a bloody murderer? Look here," he said, "I don't know just how to put it—it was twenty-five years ago, all that—Mary'll tell you, if you ask her, that she's been absolutely happy every minute of all that time—even when we were hiding in swamps and starving. Now that side of it wouldn't have entered the law's head, would it?" He smiled very peacefully. "Out here, of course," he said, "it's very different. Almost everybody here has gotten away from something or other. And mostly we've done well, and are happy and self-respecting. It's a big world," he looked out affectionately over his rolling, upland acres, "and a funny world. Did Mary tell you that I've just been re-elected sheriff?"
THE DESPOILER
Forrest paused when his explorations had brought him to the edge of the beechwood, all dappled with golden lights and umber shadows, and stood for a time brooding upon those intimate lawns and flowery gardens that seemed, as it were, but roofless extensions of the wide, open house.
It is probable that his brooding had in it an estimate of the cost of these things. It was thus that he had looked upon the blooded horses in the river-fields and the belted cattle in the meadows. It was thus that his grave eyes passed beyond the gardens and moved from corner to corner of the house, from sill to cornice, relating the porticos and interminable row of French windows to dollars and cents. He had, of course, been of one mind, and now he was of two; but that octagonal slug of California minting, by which he resolved his doubts, fell heads, and he stepped with an acquiescent reluctance from the dappled shadows into the full sunlight of the gardens and moved slowly, with a kind of awkward and cadaverous grandeur, toward the house. He paused by the sundial to break a yellow rose from the vine out of which its fluted supporting column emerged. So standing, and regarding the rose slowly twirled in his fingers, he made a dark contrast to the brightly-colored gardens. His black cape hung in unbroken lines from his gaunt shoulders to his knees, and his face had the modeling and the gentle gloom of Dante's.
The rose fell from his hand, and he moved onward through the garden and entered the house as nonchalantly as if it had been his own. He found himself in a cool dining-room, with a great chimney-piece and beaded white paneling. The table was laid for seven, and Forrest's intuitive good taste caused his eyes to rest with more than passing interest upon the stately loving-cup, full of roses, that served for a centre-piece. But from its rosy garlands caught up in the mouths of demon-heads he turned suddenly to the portrait over the chimney-piece. It was darker and more sedate than the pictures to which Forrest was accustomed, but in effect no darker or more sedate than himself. The gentleman of the portrait, a somewhat pouchy-cheeked, hook-nosed Revolutionary, in whose wooden and chalky hand was a rolled document, seemed to return Forrest's glance with a kind of bored courtesy.