As he sat there staring, he mentally and for the last time reviewed the life that lay behind him; before him uprose all the contemptuous years, the sad wreckage of high hopes and tinsel glories, the hard and wretched fact of liquor. He would shut it out of his mind forever, after to-day, he thought. He would live in the present only, from day to day. He would try a new life—and let the dead bury their dead!
He turned to Mrs. Crump, his sad and earnest eyes looking oddly cynical.
“I do not think it humanly possible that I can resist liquor,” he said, gravely. “I am frank with you. It were easy to swear that I would pluck out drowned honour by the roots—but, madam, I think that this morning I am weary of swearing. I have tried to abstain, and I cannot. Always it is the first week or two of torture that downs me——
“You’re showin’ sense, now,” said the lady. “Want to try it or not?”
He rose in the car and attempted a bow in his showy and pitiful manner. In this bow, however, was an element of grace, the more pronounced by its sharp contrast to his gaunt, sombre aspect.
“Madam, I am deeply sensible of the compliment you pay me. Yet, in picking from the gutter a drunken failure, are you wise? I am entirely ignorant of prospecting and——”
“Don’t worry none. Ye’ll learn that quick enough.”
Again Thaddeus bowed. “But, madam, I understand that prospectors go off into the desert places and live. In justice to yourself, do you not think that your enemies might seize viciously upon the least excuse for misinterpretation of character——”
For the first time Shea saw Mehitabel Crump gripped in anger. He paused, aghast.
Her gigantic form quivered with rage then stiffened into towering wrath. Her tanned, age-touched features suddenly hardened into sentient bronze from which her blue eyes blazed forth terribly, jewelled indices of an indomitable and quick-flaming spirit within.