She clung to that: it was an obligation that lay on her, a secret obligation, but the more imperative for that. She could not hold a forfeited life. She must redeem herself. The hardest thing was demanded of her. And then, one could not go on with this bleeding heart.
"The hardest thing—the hardest thing!" she murmured, shutting her lips tightly on the words, with a sudden inexplicable fear of some flaw in her logic. Again and again she forced the words from her lips with stubborn, deaf insistence, to still some mental voice of inquiry, a passionless, cold thing that lifted itself in her brain, but which she could beat down with this bludgeon of her phrase. She was even bold enough to cross-examine herself presently. The hardest thing was demanded of her, and she was doing the hardest thing. Her hand fell on the laden holster at her side with a panic impulse to rush the thing through. But the touch reassured her and she laughed in the consciousness of her security. She could not be thwarted now, and she need not hurry. She could afford to the very end that deliberate thoroughness with which she had begun. Her will for the thing had lost none of its iron.
An hour or so after the darkness had crowded the hills in upon her she rode into a dense mist, chilling to the bone after the dryness of the early night. The range of her vision was again shortened, and even the little horse halted more frequently to feel his way. Once he seemed to have wandered, and stood a moment in uncertainty. She let him rest, then flicked his shoulder with the bridle rein, and he struggled stanchly on over the ridge of loose gravel where he had halted, feeling for the trail with expert hoofs. He found it a moment later, and was moving forward again. She patted his neck and blessed him for being so "trail wise." He, too, was doing the hardest thing, and doing it faithfully.
She fell again into the rhythm of her battle cry—"The hardest thing—the hardest thing!"
And yet it was not hard. She was so near to it now that she could afford the luxury of this admission. It required only a sense of justice, of moral symmetry. She had taken a life—two, doubtless—and by the law she must pay. But no debtor could have had a willinger spirit. And she would not be paying too much. She recalled certain homely words of an old man whose life she had watched out, a man whose worn, seamed face showed his right to speak.
"Experience, lady, a dear thing sometimes—yes—but never too dear. It is worth always just what we pay for it. It is had at slightest cost, high or low. No other thing is like it thus. All else of the world may cheat us in their price, but not experience. Our fee shall vary as we are quick to learn, but the good God teaches us what we must know at flat cost, as says the merchant, with never the penny of profit. This it saves much to know—much sorrowing, much whining. It would make us wise—so!"
"So!" She echoed his rich guttural imitatively and laughed as she drew in a deep breath of the damp air. She was numb with the cold now, and laughed at foolish life for registering so petty a discomfort at such a moment. The humor of it came home to her—that she should sensually feel the cold.
Another span of hours the little horse strode on at his quick step, valiantly lifting her up steep ascents, or descending the sides of ravines with devoted sureness of foot, treading narrow ways where she could feel that he hugged the bush-lined bank, and knew that a fall lay the other side.
"The hardest thing—the hardest thing!" Again she muttered it, beating at her purpose. And again, that mental, passionless query lifted its head. Strike it down as she would, its cool, curious eyes were always on her, not denying, not disputing, only questioning, calmly but implacably, until her soul seemed to writhe in loyalty to her motives, holding them sacred even from questioning.
"The hardest thing"—but her brain rang with the relentless question—"are you doing it because it is the hardest thing or because you want to do it?"