“Mrs. Hulings has gone,” the servant told him. “A man came looking for you. It seems they had Wooddrop's manager back in the Mills tract and were going to string him up. But you couldn't be found. Mrs. Hulings, she went to stop it.”
An inky cloud floated nauseously before his eyes—not himself alone, but Gisela, dragged into the dark whirlpool gathered about his destiny! He was momentarily stunned, with twitching hands and a riven, haggard face, remembering the sodden brutality of the men he had seen in the smoke of charring, isolated stacks; and then a sharp energy seized him.
“How long back?” Hulings demanded.
“An hour or more, perhaps a couple.”
Alexander raged at the mischance that had sent Gisela on such an errand. Nothing, he felt, with Wooddrop's manager secured, would halt the charcoal burners' revenge of Wishon's death. The rain now beat down in a heavy diagonal pour, and twilight was gathering.
“We must go at once for Mrs. Hulings,” he said. Then he saw Gisela approaching, accompanied by a small knot of men. She walked directly up to him, her crinoline soggy with rain, her hair plastered on her brow; but her deathly pallor drove everything else from his observation. She shuddered slowly, her skirt dripping ceaselessly about her on the sod.
“I was too late!” she said in a dull voice. “They had done it!” She covered her eyes, moved back from the men beside her, from him. “Swinging a little... all alone! So sudden—there, before me!” A violent shivering seized her.
“Come,” Alexander Hulings said hoarsely; “you must get out of the wet. Warm things. Immediately!”
He called imperatively for Gisela's maid, and together they assisted her up to her room. Above, Gisela had a long, violent chill; and he sent a wagon for the doctor at Harmony.
The doctor arrived, and mounted the stairs; but, half an hour later, he would say little. Alexander Hulings commanded him to remain in the house. The lines deepened momentarily on the former's countenance; he saw himself unexpectedly in a shadowy pier glass, and stood for a long while subconsciously surveying the lean, grizzled countenance that followed his gaze out of the immaterial depths. “Alexander Hulings,” he said aloud, in a tormented mockery; “the master of—of life!” He was busy with the local marshal when the doctor summoned him from the office.