“Yes, Natachee. Yesterday I believed that there was nothing left for me in life but hate. Then you, last night, revealed to me what hate might do, and I knew the strength of love. I must go now—to the woman who is waiting for me, down there in the Cañon of Gold.”
But Hugh Edwards, when he told Saint Jimmy that George Clinton was living, had been mistaken.
The very night that Natachee brought the girl from that place where Sonora Jack had taken her, Marta’s father died in a Los Angeles hospital. In the same hour that the Indian and the girl were stealing from the Mexican house south of the border, the man for whose crime Donald Payne was sent to prison was dictating a confession. With the last of his strength, he signed the instrument.
Natachee, when he offered to Hugh Edwards his scheme of revenge, did not know that at that very moment every newspaper in the land was heralding the innocence of the escaped convict, Donald Payne. The man who went down the mountain slopes and ridges toward the Cañon of Gold that morning did not know that he was even then a free man. The girl who waited for her lover who had never spoken to her of his love did not know. But Doctor Burton, when he went to Oracle the evening before to complete his arrangements for that wedding journey, had received the news.
It was like Saint Jimmy to meet Hugh Edwards on the mountain side that morning, and to tell him what he had learned before Hugh had come within sight of the house in the cañon. It was like Saint Jimmy, too, to suggest that perhaps now Marta need never know, at least not until after they had returned from their trip abroad.
CHAPTER XXXV
FREEDOM
It was the plan that had been arranged by Saint Jimmy.
LATE in the afternoon of that appointed day, an automobile from Tucson turned off from the Bankhead Highway into the old road that leads to the Cañada del Oro.
At the point where the road enters the Cañon of Gold, which is as far as an automobile can go on that ancient trail, Hugh and Marta, with old Thad, were waiting.
The automobile would take them, without a stop, straight south through Tucson to Nogales, where they would cross the international boundary line into Nogales, Mexico. From there, immediately after the wedding ceremony, Donald Payne and his bride would travel by rail to Mexico City, from which point in due time they would go to the lands of the old world. Thad would return to the Cañada del Oro, and would, for a while at least, make his home with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton.