“You’ve got a mouthful of truth out of me. Can’t you see how it is?” growled Crowley.
“So that’s what you are, is it?” Latisan dwelt on the subject, twisting the handle that Crowley had given him.
“Mr. Latisan, listen to me! I implore you to forget me—what I am! Go to your work.”
“My work has nothing to do with this matter between you and me. So that’s what you are!” he repeated, insistent on his one idea, looking her up and down. “A detective sneak!”
“I am done with the work. I am a human being, at any rate, and you promised me——”
He sliced his hand through the air. “That’s all off! You lied to me. It must have been a lie, seeing what you are. But I believed, and I stood up and took you for mine. The word has gone out. Every man on the Noda will know about it. I had no rights over your life till you met me. But when a woman lies to a man to make him do this or that she is laughing at him behind his back. You have played me for a poor fool in the tall timber. That’s the word that’s starting now.”
“If you have found out how worthless I am,” she sobbed, “you can go on with your work and be a real man.”
He loosed the leash on himself. He mocked her with bitter irony, his face working hideously. “‘Go on with your work!’ Don’t you have any idea what men are up these woods? Who’ll take orders from me after this? They’ll hoot me off the river! I’m done. You have put me down and under!”
More than the spirit of sacrifice was actuating her then. Her impulses were inextricably mingled, but they all tended to one end, to save him from error. His scorn had touched her heart; meeting him on his own plane—on the level of honesty—woman with man, she was conscious of bitter despair because he was leaving her life. She was fighting for her own—for the old man in the big house, for the new love that was springing up out of her sympathy for this champion from whom, without realizing the peril of her procedure, she had filched the weapons of his manhood at the moment when he needed them most.
“The heart has gone out of me! You have taken it out!” he cried.