“I tried to bring a nurse,” explained Redfield, “but I couldn’t find anybody but old Lize who would come.”
“I don’t blame them,” replied Ross. “It isn’t a nice job, even when you’ve got all the conveniences.”
His eyes, as he spoke, were on the figure of Lee, who still stood on the bridge awed and worshipful, barred of approach by Lize. “She shall not know,” he silently vowed. “Why put her through useless suffering and shame? Edward Wetherford’s disordered life is near its end. To betray him to his wife and daughter would be but the reopening of an old wound.”
He was stirred to the centre of his heart by the coming of Lee Virginia, so sweet and brave and trustful. His stern mood melted as he watched her there waiting, with her face turned toward him, longing to help. “She would have come alone if necessary,” he declared, with a fuller revelation of the self-sacrificing depth of her love, “and she would come to my side this moment if I called her.”
To the District Forester he said no more than to Redfield. “Edwards is evidently an old soldier,” he declared. “He was sent up here by Gregg to take the place of a sick herder. He took care of that poor herder till he died, and then helped me to bury him; now here he lies a victim to his own sense of duty, and I shall not desert him.” And to himself he added: “Nor betray him.”
He went back to his repulsive service sustained and soothed by the little camp of faithful friends on the other side of the stream. The tender grace of the girl’s attitude, her air of waiting, of anxiety, of readiness to serve, made him question the basis of his family pride. He recognized in her the spirit of her sire, tempered, sweetened, made more stable, by something drawn from unknown sources. At the moment he felt that Lee was not merely his equal but his superior in purity of character and in purpose. “What nonsense we talk of heredity, of family,” he thought.
Standing over the wasted body of his patient, he asked again: “Why let even Lize know? To her Ed Wetherford is dead. She remembers him now as a young, dashing, powerful horseman, a splendid animal, a picturesque lover. Why wring her heart by permitting her to see this wreck of what was once her pride?”
As for Wetherford himself, nothing mattered very much. He spoke of the past now and then, but not in the phrase of one who longs for the return of happy days—rather in the voice of one who murmurs a half-forgotten song. He called no more for his wife and child, and if he had done so Cavanagh would have reasoned that the call arose out of weakness, and that his better self, his real self, would still desire to shield his secret from his daughter.
And this was true, for during one of his clearest moments Wetherford repeated his wish to die a stranger. “I’m goin’ out like the old-time West, a rag of what I once was. Don’t let them know—put no name over me—just say: ‘An old cow-puncher lies here.’”
Cavanagh’s attempt to change his hopeless tone proved unavailing. Enfeebled by his hardships and his prison life, he had little reserve force upon which to draw in fighting such an enemy. He sank soon after this little speech into a coma which continued to hold him in its unbroken grasp as night fell.