We were both silent for a few minutes, and I felt that Boone's task, self-imposed or otherwise, was a worthy one. Lane was a man without either anger or compassion—an incarnation of cunning and avarice more terrible to human welfare than any legendary monster of the olden time. It was no figure of speech to declare that he fattened on poor men's blood and agony, and his overthrow could not be anything but a blessing. Still, it was in prosaic speech that, considering the practical aspect of the question, I said: "I wish you luck, but you will need a long patience, besides time and money."
"I have them," was the answer. "The first was the hardest to acquire. Time—I could wait ages if I knew the end was certain; and, as to money, when it came too late to save her, someone died in the old country, and part of the property fell to me. Well, you can guess my purpose—using all means short of bloodshed and perjury to take him in his own net. She who sleeps there was pitiful and gentle, but she hated oppression and cruelty, and I feel that if she knows—and I think it is so—she would smile on me."
Boone's face was plain before me under the moon. It was quietly confident, calm, and yet stamped with a solemn purpose. He had, it seemed, mastered his passions, and would perhaps be the more dangerous because he followed tirelessly, with brain unclouded by hatred or impatience. I felt that there was much I should say in the shape of encouragement and sympathy, but the only words that rose to my lips were: "He has fiendish cunning."
"And I was once a careless fool!" said Boone. "Still, the most cunning forget, and blunder at times. I, however, can never forget, and when he does, it will be ill for Lane. I have—I don't know why—spoken to you, Ormesby, as I have spoken to no man in the Dominion before, and I feel I need ask no promise of you. I am going east with the sunrise, but I must be alone now."
I left him to keep his vigil with his dead, and camped in a hollow some distance away. That is to say, I tethered the horse, rolled a thick brown blanket round me, and used the saddle for a pillow. There was no hardship in this. The grasses, if a trifle damp, were soft and springy, the night still and warm; and many a better man has slept on a worse bed in the Western Dominion. Slumber did not, however, come at first, and I lay watching the stars, neither asleep nor wholly awake, until they grew indistinct, and a woman's figure, impalpable as the moonlight, gathered shape upon a rise of the prairie.
It was borne in on me that this was Helen Boone risen from her sleep; for she was ethereal, and her face with its passionless calmness not that of a mortal, while no shadow touched the grasses when she passed, and, fading, gave place or changed into one I knew. Haldane's elder daughter looked down at me from the rise, but she, too, seemed of another world, wearing a cold serenity and a beauty that was not of this earth. She also changed with a marvelous swiftness before my bewildered vision, and it was now Lucille Haldane who moved across the prairie with soft words of pity on her lips and yet anger in her eyes. She, at least, appeared not transcendental, but a living, breathing creature of flesh and blood subject to human weaknesses, and I raised myself on one elbow to speak to her.
The prairie was empty. Nothing moved on it; even the horse stood still, while, when I sank back again, moonlight and starlight went out together; and perhaps it was as well, for, sleeping or waking, a plain stock-raiser has no business with such fancies, and next morning I convinced myself that I had dreamed it all. I had doubtless done so, and the explanation was simple. The influence of the night, or the words of Boone, had galvanized into abnormal activity some tiny convolution of the brain; but, even that once granted, it formed the beginning, not the end, of the question, and Boone had, it seemed, supplied the best solution when he said we know so little as yet.
The sun was lifting above the prairie when I set out in search of Boone with my horse's bridle over my arm. I met him swinging across the springy sod in long elastic strides, but there was nothing about him which suggested one preyed upon by morbid fancies or the visionary. His eyes were a little heavy, but that was all, for with both of us the dreams of the night had melted before the rising sun. The air had been freshened by the dew, and the breeze, which dried the grasses, roused one to a sense of human necessities and the knowledge that there was a day's work to be done. I was also conscious of an unfanciful and very prosaic emptiness.
"I wonder where we could get anything to eat. I have a long ride before me," said Boone, when he greeted me.
"It can hardly be safe for you to be seen anywhere in this neighborhood," I said; and Boone smiled.