"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and leave you, Richard?"
He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying whisper fluttered at his lips:
"You cannot! Think!—the child!"
He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang, remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes rolled up, and she died.
He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she could not have borne to have him leave her.
The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him praying—a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.
But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.
"Our Father Who art in Heaven...."
He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the burning blue vault of ether Who heard ... and yet, for her sake, supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even now....
"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come...."