He loosed her and she sank, a weary, frightened heap, at his feet. Then very tenderly he gathered her in his arms and carried her to the great flat rock and placed her on the old coat she had brought him.
"You know I wouldn't hurt you fer the hull world, Cass." He knelt beside her, and throwing his arms across her lap buried his face in her dress, still trembling with his unmastered emotion. She thought him sobbing.
"Can you give me your promise now, Cass?"
"Now? Now, Frale, your hands are blood-guilty," she said, slowly and hopelessly.
He grew cold and still, waiting in the silence. His hands clutched her clothing, but he did not lift his head. He had shed blood and had lost her. They might take him and hang him. At last he told her so, brokenly, and she knew not what to do.
Gently she placed her hand on his head and drew the thick silken hair through her fingers, and the touch, to his stricken soul, was a benediction. The pity of her cooled the fever in his blood and swept over his spirit the breath of healing. For the first time, after the sin and the horror of it, after the passion and its anguish, came tears. He wept and wiped his tears with her dress.
Then she told him how her mother had been hurt. How Hoyle had driven the half-broken colt and the mule all the way to Carew's alone, to bring her home, and how he had come nigh being killed. How a gentleman had helped her when the colt tried to run and the mule was mean, and how she had brought him home with her.
Then he lifted his head and looked at her, his haggard face drawn with suffering, and the calmness of her eyes still further soothed and comforted him. They were filled with big tears, and he knew the tears were for him, for the change which had come upon him, lonely and wretched, doomed to hide out on the mountain, his clothes torn by the brambles and soiled by the red clay of the holes into which he had crawled to hide himself. He rose and sat at her side and held her head on his shoulder with gentle hand.
"Pore little sister—pore little Cass! I been awful mean an' bad," he murmured. "Hit's a badness I cyan't 'count fer no ways. When I seed that thar doctah man—I reckon hit war him I seed lyin' asleep up yander on Hangin' Rock—a big tall man, right thin an' white in the face—" he paused and swallowed as if loath to continue.
"Frale!" she cried, and would have drawn away but that he held her.