He pulled up, swaying, and his hands fell slowly to his side.
"Why—Mary!"
It was the moan of despair, of freshly-lit fires for ever extinguished.
Mary Merrill rose from the piano seat, her hands tight against her cheeks, and tottered to her room. For a full minute he stared unbelievingly at the locked door, then he lifted his Stetson slowly from the floor and stumbled out.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE CHASE AMONG THE CLIFFS
The heart-stricken man staggered down the gravel path before the house and struck blindly across the prairie toward the river. Pink Eye, standing with drooping rein, tilted his ears and neighed to him, but he was deaf and blind to everything save his bleeding heart. Something in the rugged lines of the river cliffs drew him on. There was clamour to match the chaos in his mind, there was solitude and loneliness where to fight out the problem that stretched out and on through the rest of his days. Pink Eye neighed again, and tried to follow sideways, but a foot caught a dragging rein and pulled him up.
Cockney plunged through the long grass to the height west of the ranch valley and dropped limply into the first ragged peaks, where he lay on his back, staring with unseeing eyes into the cloudless sky. His head was paining him, and the bandage had slipped, but he thought it all a part of his mental suffering. Dimly his mind went back to the beginning—to his fight with Professor Bulkeley. But defeat did not trouble him now; the struggle was nothing more to him than a series of pictures of Mary's emotions. A groan—a gasp—a cry—the swinging of that small arm that settled the issue. That was what blinded his eyes with tears and shook his body with sobs. There lay the verdict he had sought so rashly to alter with his story. Love—he knew it now—was not a thing of many lives. One could not kill it and hope ever again to breathe life into its nostrils. Love—real love—came but once. It lived but once. Like a leaf that withers before an icy wind, love died for ever at the hand of cruelty.
For the past year—ever since he knew he had no right to marry Mary—he had suffered trebly, the ignominy of a bigamist, the horror of the injury he had done her, and the tearing agony of his grim fight to destroy her love before it learned the truth. And he only knew how well he had succeeded in that when he would have given his life to change it. Ever since he had laid foul hands on a woman's throat he had been an insult to her sex.
Big Cockney Aikens covered his face and shuddered. If a lifetime of repentance—— But there was to be no chance for repentance—there could be none without Mary. He must go on and on, living his life alone—no Mary, no pardon of God or himself without Mary to keep him straight. The years ahead were a long road of blank despair leading—where? Without Mary, without friends, without hope, without ambition or plans or pride—the end could only be that to which he had been tending this past year of reckless memory.