A picture of Dennie down in the Kickapoo Corral, with the flickering firelight on her rippling hair, the weird, shadowy woodland, and the old Indian legend all came back to the young man now, though why he could not say.
“I certainly would never bring harm to you nor yours,” he said kindly.
“I can't inform on the scoundrel. I can only watch him. The woman he was in love with years ago, who would n't stand for his wild ways—that's the gray-haired woman at Pigeon Place. Her life's been one long tragedy, though she is not forty yet.”
The anguish on the old man's face was pitiful as he spoke.
“She has a reason of her own for living here, and she is the soul of courage. On the night of the Fenneben accident, I was out her way—yes, running away from Bond Saxon. I knew if I stayed in town, I'd get drunk on a bottle left at my door. So I tore out in the rain and the dark to fight it out with the devil inside of me. And out at Pigeon Place I run onto this fiend. When I ordered him back to his hiding place, he vowed he'd get Fenneben and put him in the river. There's one or two human things about him still. One is his fear of little children, and one is his love for that woman. He really did adore her years ago. I tracked home after him, and you know the rest. He put up some story to the Dean to entice him out there.”
He hesitated, then ceased to speak.
“Why the Dean?” Burgess asked.
“Because Lloyd Fenneben's the man she loved years ago, and her folks wouldn't let her marry,” Bond Saxon said sadly.
Burgess felt as if the limestone ridge was giving way beneath him.
“Where is she now?”