"I don't see that it is any of your business."
"You don't?" Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape. "Well, I'll make it mine. You're going to Lone Tree."
Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender's indefiniteness to the Cougar's dim crouch. He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was reinforced by enormous racial and family pride—the combination that made the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and mêlée. Mistaking the situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.
"What have you chaps been drinking? Here; pass the bottle."
"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.
Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden suspicion as impossible. Out of patience, galled by this mysterious opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy? I do not intend—"
"—To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted. "Yes, we know. You was heading up for Glaves's place."
Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh. "I must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs. And since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to Lone Tree?"
"I kin that." The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man's stern bass launched on the quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this oldest of woodland sagas. Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on the trail, he told all—Jed Hines's cruel fury; birth and burial of his, Molyneux's child; the outcast girl's subsequent illness; Helen's kindness; the doctor's philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that protected her from social infamy. "An' us that saw her through her trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."
If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would not appear in such hard colors of black and white. It were false to paint Molyneux irredeemably black. "Your child!" He winced at the phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of his offence was borne in upon him. His child? It was the flesh of his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter and the kindly priest! The thought struck with enormous force—then faded. For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to the education of a gentleman. Through pride of family, the dead hands of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.