Dan eyed the fortunate prospector greedily, and his predatory instinct brought him to a quick decision. He went to Lou, who was sitting, drearily enough, alone at a table in a corner of the room. He spoke to her softly, that none might overhear, though of this there was little danger amid the noise of rollicking gayety.
"There's a chap here I mean to chum up with a bit," Dangerous Dan explained. "I'll introduce him, and you must be nice enough to him to make him talk."
The woman nodded assent. For it had come to such a pass. Often, she had stooped to play decoy for the man in his schemes against his fellows.
Dan McGrew had persistently lied to this woman. By his arts he had ruined her life. But Lou had still no inkling of the truth. One great fact was impressed upon her as time passed: This man loved her—and he was loyal to her. Since she had lost everything dear, it seemed her duty to give the worthless remnant of her life to the one who thus esteemed it something precious.
When Lou returned to consciousness, after the fever and delirium that seized her the dreadful night of the flight from home, her first question was concerning the drowned child.
The man at the bedside met her imploring gaze steadfastly, and spoke his falsehoods so convincingly that she had never a doubt. The river had been searched with every care, he declared. The body had not been found. The bereaved mother had been denied the last pitiful solace of grief—a place of burial wherein to mourn over the lost.
After the final deprivation, Lou was apathetic. The light had gone out of her life. She was numb with misery. Her most distinct emotion was a sort of passive gratitude toward the man who had so frightfully wronged her. It was in obedience to the promptings of this feeling that Lou meekly accepted his every suggestion. She did so with the more readiness because these suggestions were so skillfully contrived as to seem the epitome of unselfishness.
Thus, for example, there was the matter of divorce. Dan learned that the kindly woman into whose house he had brought Lou suffered from nostalgia. She had come out into the West with an eager, improvident husband, who had died and left her with this tiny home, on which the mortgage of a few hundreds rested as a burden beyond her strength to remove. She was sick with longing to go back among the home-folk. Dan's sympathetic voice and candid, honest eyes won confidence from the lonely old woman. And, too, she quickly grew fond of the invalid in her house. Therefore, she had no hesitation in acceding to the proposal made to her by Dan McGrew: that she should travel to the East with Lou, as nurse and companion. The money offered to her by Dan McGrew for these services was enough to ease her declining years. Moreover, there was the added inducement that, in this manner, she would be able to return to the place for which she longed.
Lou made no objection to the arrangement. She liked the old woman, and the instinct of flight was still upon her.... She was only grateful to the man who was at such pains in her behalf.