"Tom—does—doesn't it mean anything to you? Can't it mean lots to both of us now that—"
"Cut it, I tell you! Think I killed one guard and beat the other till I'd broke every bone in his body to come here and listen to such guff? You've been having a high old time, eh, and you never give a thought to me up there! I might 'a' rotted in that black hole for all you'd care, you—"
"Don't! I did, Tom; I did." I was shivering at the name, but I couldn't bear his thinking that way of me. "I went up once, but they wouldn't let me see you. I wrote you, but they sent back the letters. Mag went up, too, but had to come back. And that time I brought you—"
My voice trailed off. In that minute I saw myself on the way up to Sing Sing with the basket and all my hopes and all my schemes for amusing him.
And this is what I'd have seen if they'd let me in—this big, gruff, murdering beast!
Oh, yes—yes—beast is what he is, and it didn't make him look it less that he believed me and—and began to think of me in a different way.
"I thought you wouldn't go back on a feller, Nance. That's why I come straight to you. It was my game to have you hide me for a day or two, till you could make a strike somewhere and we'd light out together. How're ye fixed? Pretty smart, eh? You look it, my girl, you look—My eye, Nance, you look good enough to eat, and I'm hungry for you!"
Maggie, if I'd had to die for it I couldn't have moved then. You'd think a man would know when the woman he's holding in his arms is fainting—sick at the touch of him. A woman would. It wasn't my Tom that I'd known, that I'd worked with and played with and—It was a great brute, whose mouth—who had no eyes, no ears, no senses but—ah!...
He laughed when I broke away from him at last. He laughed! And I knew then I'd have to tell him straight in words.
"Tom," I gasped, "you can have all I've got; and it's plenty to get you out of the way. But—but you can't have—me—any more. That's—done!"