“I am Donna Corblay.”
Carey bowed and continued.
“Your husband told me once that he had some great plans afoot, and did me the honor to ask me to help him—” he paused, watching her wistfully—“and I want to know if you object to me as an associate of your husband in his work.”
Donna looked at him gravely. “I have neither bitterness nor revengeful feeling against you, Mr. Carey” she replied.
“I have suffered” he said, “but I haven't paid all of the price. Tell your husband that I want to help him. I have thought it over and I was coming to tell him myself. Tell him, please, that I would appreciate the privilege of being a minority stockholder in his enterprise and I will honor his sight drafts while I have a dollar left.”
He lifted his hat and walked away, and Donna, gazing after him, realized that the past was dead and only the future remained. Carey's crime had been a sordid one, but with her broader vision Donna saw that the lives of the few must ever be counted as paltry sacrifices in the advancement of the race. Her father, her mother, Harley P. Hennage, Borax O'Bourke and the long, sad, barren years of her own girlhood had all been sacrifices to this man's insatiable greed and lust for power, and now that the finish was reached she realized the truth of Bob McGraw's philosophy—that out of all great evils great good must come.
Truly selfishness, greed, revenge and inhumanity are but the burdens of a day; all that is small and weak and unworthy may not survive, while that which is great and good in a man must some day break its hobbles and sweep him on to the fulfillment of his destiny. She saw her husband and his one-time enemy toiling side by side in the great, hot, hungry heart of Inyo, preparing homes for the helpless and the oppressed—working out the destinies of their people; and she cried out with the happiness that was hers.
Ah, yes, they had all suffered, but now out of the dregs of their suffering the glad years would come bearing their precious burden of love and service. How puerile did the sacrifices of the past seem now—how terribly out of proportion to the great task that lay before them, with the sublime result already in sight! Surely there was only one quality in humankind that really mattered, softening suffering and despair and turning away wrath, and as Donna knelt by the grave of the man who had possessed that quality to such an extent that he had considered his life cheap as a means of expressing it, she prayed that her infant son might be endowed with the virtues and brains of his father and the wanderer who slept beneath the stone:
“Dear God, help me to raise a Man and teach him to be kind.”
THE END