"I thought mebbe as how you'd had a drop too much," the bar-keeper explained, "an' was jest nacherly sleepin' it off. If we'd knowed you was sick, we'd have got the Doc in to give you a look-over."
"That's all right," Jim answered. "I'm not blaming you any—unless it was the drink you gave me that poisoned me."
Presently Jim went out into the street. He found his horse tied to a ring at the corner of the saloon building. He unhitched it, mounted, and rode slowly homeward. He was still in distress physically, but his condition was improving from moment to moment, so that he no longer felt apprehension as to the outcome. Soon, indeed, he became sufficiently sure of himself to put his horse to a trot.... As the shadows of evening drew down, he rode up to the door of his home.
There was a bank of lurid clouds in the west, massed heavily on the horizon. The air was motionless, weighted with portents of coming storm. Jim felt the oppressiveness, and in a subtle way it rested upon his mood as something sinister. A weight of melancholy pressed upon him as he entered the house. The stillness of the air seemed reënforced in the quiet of the living-room into which he stepped. There was no sound. He listened for his wife's greeting. It did not come. He listened for the pattering steps of Nell, running to welcome him. He did not hear them. The silence hurt him in some curious way. He had an overwhelming sense of the absence of those he loved—the absence of wife and child.
He crossed the room to his desk. He slipped the loop of the quirt from his wrist and let it fall on the desk. The effect of the drug was not yet assuaged; he was very thirsty. He called to the maid passing through the hall:
"Bring me a glass of water, Mary."
The girl came quickly with the drink. She and the other servants were in a ferment of curiosity, full of suspicions and wonderings. There had been much gossip in the house over the fight between the two men the day before, which had not passed unobserved. To-day, the wife had suddenly left her home with the man who had been ordered out of the house. Over this fact, scandalous tongues were clacking loudly. Mary had made it her business to be passing in the hall, in order that she might note the attitude of the master at such a time. So she stood, in eager expectation, eying her master closely, as he took the glass of water.
But he set the glass back on the tray suddenly, for he saw an envelope lying on the desk, addressed in the handwriting of the woman he loved:
"Jim."
A foreboding of disaster crashed upon him. He trembled, standing there with the envelope unopened in his hand. Then he strove to throw off this craven dread—for which there was no reason. He turned to the maid.