CHAPTER XXIV. ANGUISH AND BLISS.
Joe Garson had shouted his confession without a second of reflection. But the result must have been the same had he taken years of thought. Between him and her as the victim of the law, there could be no hesitation for choice. Indeed, just now, he had no heed to his own fate. The prime necessity was to save her, Mary, from the toils of the law that were closing around her. For himself, in the days to come, there would be a ghastly dread, but there would never be regret over the cost of saving her. Perhaps, some other he might have let suffer in his stead—not her! Even, had he been innocent, and she guilty of the crime, he would still have taken the burden of it on his own shoulders. He had saved her from the waters—he would save her until the end, as far as the power in him might lie. It was thus that, with the primitive directness of his reverential love for the girl, he counted no sacrifice too great in her behalf. Joe Garson was not a good man, at the world esteems goodness. On the contrary, he was distinctly an evil one, a menace to the society on which he preyed constantly. But his good qualities, if few, were of the strongest fiber, rooted in the deeps of him. He loathed treachery. His one guiltiness in this respect had been, curiously enough, toward Mary herself, in the scheme of the burglary, which she had forbidden. But, in the last analysis, here his deceit had been designed to bring affluence to her. It was his abhorrence of treachery among pals that had driven him to the murder of the stool-pigeon in a fit of ungovernable passion. He might have stayed his hand then, but for the gusty rage that swept him on to the crime. None the less, had he spared the man, his hatred of the betrayer would have been the same.... And the other virtue of Joe Garson was the complement of this—his own loyalty, a loyalty that made him forget self utterly where he loved. The one woman who had ever filled his heart was Mary, and for her his life were not too much to give.
The suddenness of it all held Mary voiceless for long seconds. She was frozen with horror of the event.
When, at last, words came, they were a frantic prayer of protest.
“No, Joe! No! Don't talk—don't talk!”
Burke, immensely gratified, went nimbly to his chair, and thence surveyed the agitated group with grisly pleasure.
“Joe has talked,” he said, significantly.
Mary, shaken as she was by the fact of Garson's confession, nevertheless retained her presence of mind sufficiently to resist with all her strength.
“He did it to protect me,” she stated, earnestly.