"Oh, oh, my man, my Ned!"
He felt the linen on her face and shivered, but spoke no more. She lay down by him and, overcome by her strange pure passion and the fatigue of the miles she had travelled to come to him, she at last fell asleep.
Then the slow dawn grew up over the clouds, and came in colour across the sunburnt hills and entered their home. Ned sat up in bed beside her and saw her dear face covered by its shroud.
"Help me, oh, God!" said the man.
And perhaps help might come, not from any God, but from the deep heart that prayed to the spirit of man which hides in all hearts and only answers to prayer, if it answers at all to any pleading.
XX
Though the railroad, the mighty railroad, the one and only Railroad of the Big Admiring World, was the chief topic of talk from Montreal to the Pacific, and not least so in little Kamloops by her blue river and lake, yet there was time for talk of other things even there. The men cackled and chattered in saloons and out of them, as is the fashion in sparsely inhabited countries as well as in suburbs, of all the windy ways of men. Like dust was the talk lifted up, like dust it fell and rose again. And the boys often talked of Ned, who, it seemed, had struck a new streak of virtue and avoidance of liquor.
"'Twas nip and tuck with him and the law," said one, "and he's still scared."
"True 'nough, Indian Mary nigh payssed in her checks. One more cut and she'd ha' bin mimaloose. They say so at the hawspital," said another.