His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed in the beard. He looked at her and waited.
"Why have you done this? And, now that you have brought yourself into my sight, quitting the safe shelter of darkness and anonymity, what is to hinder me from handing you over to those who administer and enforce Martial Law in this town, and will deal with you as you deserve?"
His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the brown bush. He spat upon the floor of the sacred place, and answered:
"That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about writing letters and following? Who has seen me doing it? Not one of the mob. I'm just a man that has come in off the road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in this crib? That's for you to say.... Maybe I have a message for somebody you know. So you don't choose to give it, then that's for her to hear."
He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand upon the door.
"Stop," she said, with white lips. "You will not molest the person to whom you refer. You will give your message—if it be one—to me, and to me alone."
"High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced round on her again seemed to say. "But in a little I'll bring you down off that...." He spat again upon the Chapel floor, and scratched his head under his hat, and began, like a simple, good-natured fellow, a rough miner with a heart of gold:
"No offence is meant, lady, and why should it be taken?"
She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in their flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth and grinning teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful glitter in his strange light eyes:
"I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always doing jobs for other people, and never getting thanked for it. I started to push my way up here, two hundred miles from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a letter from a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of mine put up the grubstake. His name"—his evil eyes were glued upon her face—"was Bough. You've heard that name before!"