"You poor man!" she cried. "You poor, poor man!"
He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a reason for its sudden taking off. His words strengthened the impression: "I couldn't seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I took your part against him. Of course she isn't so much to blame. I did as well as I could, but I'm neither clever nor ornamental, like Rhodes. But I tried to treat her well, didn't I? You shall judge."
"You did—of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.
"Then why did she leave me?"
Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind. The rabbit's death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against inscrutable fate in the coyote's green eyes. Its innocence was blameless as this. Yet—how could she answer problems as unsolvable as her own?
"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought her. "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it was going on—I can see it now. They did their billing and cooing under my very eyes. Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they? I trusted her—with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have defended her virtue. Was I at fault? If a man can't trust his wife, what can he do? Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"
Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him. But under its delicate complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention quickly turned to his physical welfare. He must be taken away—weaned from his sick brooding, blind questioning. "Have you eaten to-day?" she asked. "Not for three days! Go out and harness your ponies at once, and come home with me to supper." Anticipating objection, she added, "Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."
Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her do his thinking. He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy. Then he began to display some signs of animation.
It was a silent and uncomfortable drive. Instead of the usual lively jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry song of the wheels to a slushy dirge. The raw air, bleak sky, slaty grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive. Nature had shed her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging issues. Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness. Leslie spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set him again at the riddle of life.
"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter's trail. "Go to South Africa. My brother is a mining superintendent on the Rand."