"Who else?" jeered the lad frantically. "Ask her!"
Dr. McDermott recoiled before the savage glare in the young man's eyes, and slowly he began to realize the truth. He was stunned by the thought that another man than Cyril had been the cause of the girl's downfall. Who could it be? Slowly he turned the matter over in his mind, rejecting one by one each of the possible men he could think of, till at last the great sinister figure of the Bull loomed up before his mind's eye. He began clearly to recall a certain day at Bar Q when he had caught the evil expression of the cowman's face as, behind his wife's back, he followed Nettie Day with his greedy, covetous eyes.
Dr. McDermott's shoulders seemed to bend as if a great burden lay upon them, and he looked long and searchingly at the furious boy before him. When he spoke his voice was shaken with emotion.
"The Lord help you, lad!" he said. "The Lord help us all in our deep trouble. Give us sober and humble hearts. Teach us to bear as best we can the iniquities of the wicked who beset us. Amen."
The sound of the door closing fell like a lash on Cyril Stanley's brain. Alone with his frenzy and despair, he looked wildly round as if to find some outlet for his feelings. A great ax lay on the floor near the out-kitchen door, and the young man seized it and swung it high in his hand. It crashed down upon the table, splintering it in two. Again and again the ax descended until everything he had bought for Nettie Day lay in fragments about the room. Then he took from the storeroom a five-gallon can of kerosene, and emptied it deliberately over the floor.
He put on chapps, sheepskin, fur cap and spurs, tied up a few other necessaries in a bundle and walked heavily to the door. Outside, he smashed the windows and a gale of snow flew into the wrecked house. Lastly, he struck a match and, guarding the flame, he knelt in the doorway and threw it into a pool of kerosene.
The flames around the floor crept like snakes, then leaped up the walls, and from the piles of broken chairs and tables went roaring to the roof.
The house went up in a furious blaze. Long after Cyril Stanley had disappeared into the great timber country the smoke of his burning homestead rose above the blanket of snow, until the smoldering ruins were buried under the soft whiteness and covered from the eyes of the world. But later on the sunshine of the spring would melt the shroud away and reveal where his love lay ruined on the prairie.