He remained motionless there for a full minute, with the lifeless body in his arms. For once, he found himself perplexed, incompetent. But, abruptly, his thoughts cleared. Something of his usual self-confidence, so greatly shaken this night, came back to him. He smiled with a cruel, utterly selfish satisfaction.
"It's the best way out," he muttered to himself. "I'll get her into some quiet place. She'll need a lot of nursing before she gets over all this. I'm sorry for Lou, but it had to be; and it's all for the best."
With that monstrous declaration concerning the evil that he had wrought, Dan McGrew strode forward toward the nearest house, carrying the unconscious woman in his arms.
CHAPTER X
Jim and his men rode throughout the night in vain. Nowhere could they come on any trace of the fugitives. There was as yet no telephone installed in this newly settled region. But their search was thorough. There were inquiries at the railway stations in the various towns round about. At none of these had ought been seen of Dan McGrew and woman and child. Jim found himself baffled in his quest. He could not guess that the wife who had thus deserted him was lying in a stupor, from which she aroused only to rave over a lost husband and a dead child. He could not know that she had broken under the stress of sorrow, and was being ministered unto by a kindly woman to whom Dan McGrew had told many lies, in order to enlist her sympathetic aid. Even had his inquiries reached the very house in which Lou was sheltered, he would still have been deceived. For he sought a mother and her child: and here was no child.
So, the hunt availed nothing. The three who fled had vanished utterly. There came not even a rumor as to their whereabouts. They were gone as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up.
Nevertheless, Jim was not slow in learning something of the truth. He was told of Dan's visit at the ranch that fatal day, and of his wife's accompanying this visitor to the town. Those there were who had seen the two as they dismounted at Murphy's saloon, and looked in through the window. Jim, remembering his own experiences of that day in the back room of the saloon, was aroused to suspicion of the fact. He got from the bar-keeper details as to what had occurred. The fellow's reference, jestingly made, to the manner in which Jim and the woman, Jess, had embraced, gave him a sudden illumination concerning the plot of Dan McGrew by which his wife had been beguiled.
Straightway, Jim hunted out Fingie Whalen's woman. She would have denied, but, in the face of the injured husband's rage, she was fairly terrified into confession. In the end, the woman wrote at Jim's dictation, even as she had written at the dictation of Dan McGrew. But, now, she wrote without any smirk of vicious satisfaction—with a face pallid and with fingers that trembled from fear of the fierce-visaged man who stood over her in stern and menacing domination. Fingie Whalen, all his bluster gone, looked on in timid consternation, cringing from the baleful threat in the eyes of the man mortally wronged.
