“What you have said about her should condemn you to death. And I would kill you here, in this room, if it wasn’t necessary for you to take my message back to Graham. Tell him that Mary Standish—not Mary Graham—is as pure and clean and as sweet as the day she was born. Tell him that she belongs to me. I love her. She is mine—do you understand? And all the money in the world couldn’t buy one hair from her head. I’m going to take her back to the States. She is going to get a square deal, and the world is going to know her story. She has nothing to conceal. Absolutely nothing. Tell that to John Graham for me.”
He advanced upon Rossland, who had risen from his chair; his hands were clenched, his face a mask of iron.
“Get out! Go before I flay you within an inch of your rotten life!”
The energy which every fiber in him yearned to expend upon Rossland sent the table crashing back in an overturned wreck against the wall.
“Go—before I kill you!”
He was advancing, even as the words of warning came from his lips, and the man before him, an awe-stricken mass of flesh that had forgotten power and courage in the face of a deadly and unexpected menace, backed quickly to the door and escaped. He made for the corrals, and Alan watched from his door until he saw him departing southward, accompanied by two men who bore packs on their shoulders. Not until then did Rossland gather his nerve sufficiently to stop and look back. His breathless voice carried something unintelligible to Alan. But he did not return for his coat and hat.
The reaction came to Alan when he saw the wreck he had made of the table. Another moment or two and the devil in him would have been at work. He hated Rossland. He hated him now only a little less than he hated John Graham, and that he had let him go seemed a miracle to him. He felt the strain he had been under. But he was glad. Some little god of common sense had overruled his passion, and he had acted wisely. Graham would now get his message, and there could be no misunderstanding of purpose between them.
He was staring at the disordered papers on his desk when a movement at the door turned him about. Mary Standish stood before him.
“You sent him away,” she cried softly.
Her eyes were shining, her lips parted, her face lit up with a beautiful glow. She saw the overturned table, Rossland’s hat and coat on a chair, the evidence of what had happened and the quickness of his flight; and then she turned her face to Alan again, and what he saw broke down the last of that grim resolution which he had measured for himself, so that in a moment he was at her side, and had her in his arms. She made no effort to free herself as she had done in the cottonwoods, but turned her mouth up for him to kiss, and then hid her face against his shoulder—while he, fighting vainly to find utterance for the thousand words in his throat, stood stroking her hair, and then buried his face in it, crying out at last in the warm sweetness of it that he loved her, and was going to fight for her, and that no power on earth could take her away from him now. And these things he repeated until she raised her flushed face from his breast, and let him kiss her lips once more, and then freed herself gently from his arms.