“The truth, Alan. It’s up to me to tell you what I know about this young woman who calls herself Mary Standish.”
CHAPTER XVI
The physical sign of strain in Stampede’s face, and the stolid effort he was making to say something which it was difficult for him to put into words, did not excite Alan as he waited for his companion’s promised disclosure. Instead of suspense he felt rather a sense of anticipation and relief. What he had passed through recently had burned out of him a certain demand upon human ethics which had been almost callous in its insistence, and while he believed that something very real and very stern in the way of necessity had driven Mary Standish north, he was now anxious to be given the privilege of gripping with any force of circumstance that had turned against her. He wanted to know the truth, yet he had dreaded the moment when the girl herself must tell it to him, and the fact that Stampede had in some way discovered this truth, and was about to make disclosure of it, was a tremendous lightening of the situation.
“Go on,” he said at last. “What do you know about Mary Standish?”
Stampede leaned over the table, a gleam of distress in his eyes. “It’s rotten. I know it. A man who backslides on a woman the way I’m goin’ to oughta be shot, and if it was anything else—anything—I’d keep it to myself. But you’ve got to know. And you can’t understand just how rotten it is, either; you haven’t ridden in a coach with her during a storm that was blowing the Pacific outa bed, an’ you haven’t hit the trail with her all the way from Chitina to the Range as I did. If you’d done that, Alan, you’d feel like killing a man who said anything against her.”
“I’m not inquiring into your personal affairs,” reminded Alan. “It’s your own business.”
“That’s the trouble,” protested Stampede. “It’s not my business. It’s yours. If I’d guessed the truth before we hit the Range, everything would have been different. I’d have rid myself of her some way. But I didn’t find out what she was until this evening, when I returned Keok’s music machine to their cabin. I’ve been trying to make up my mind what to do ever since. If she was only making her get-away from the States, a pickpocket, a coiner, somebody’s bunco pigeon chased by the police—almost anything—we could forgive her. Even if she’d shot up somebody—” He made a gesture of despair. “But she didn’t. She’s worse than that!”
He leaned a little nearer to Alan.
“She’s one of John Graham’s tools sent up here to sneak and spy on you,” he finished desperately. “I’m sorry—but I’ve got the proof.”
His hand crept over the top of the table; slowly the closed palm opened, and when he drew it back, a crumpled paper lay between them. “Found it on the floor when I took the phonograph back,” he explained. “It was twisted up hard. Don’t know why I unrolled it. Just chance.”