"I said he was pelt hunting. So he'd told me. So I believed. But he wasn't. Say, he was a cattle rustler running a big gang who'd played hell with the district. He'd been running it for nigh five years. He'd beaten 'em to a mush, all that time, till a reward was offered. A reward of ten thousand dollars. That fixed him. There was some one knew wanted that reward, and—got it."
There was a sudden movement in the room. Elvine had abruptly risen from her chair. She moved away. She crossed to the window, and stood with her back turned, and so had thrust herself into her husband's focus.
"It's—it's a terrible—dreadful story," came her faltering comment.
"Terrible? Dreadful?" The man emitted a sound that might have been a laugh. A shudder passed down the woman's back as it fell upon her ears. "But it's nothing to the reality, Evie. Oh, I've no sympathy for his crimes. I hate rustlers like the poison they are. But he was twin to me, and I loved him. It made no difference to me. You see, he was part of me. Now—now I only hope the good God'll let me come up with the man who took the price of his blood. For four years I've dreamed that way, and I guess it don't matter if it's fifty more. I'll never change. There's some one, somewhere, who's lower down than the worst cattle rustler ever lived."
There was no response as the man ceased speaking. Elvine had not stirred from her place at the window. The moments passed. Swift, poignant moments, in which two people were enduring an agony of recollection.
The man's relentless expression never changed. His eyes were gazing straight ahead. And though his vision was obstructed by the perfect contours of his wife's figure, he was gazing through her, and beyond her, upon a scene which had for its central interest the suspended figure of a man with his head lolling forward and sideways, and his dead eyes bulging from their sockets.
Elvine never stirred. Her gaze was upon the crowded thoroughfare beyond. But like her husband, she was gazing through and beyond. She was watching the tongues of flame as they licked up the resinous trunks and foliage of a great pine bluff.
At length it was the woman's voice broke the silence.
"Where—where did this all happen?"
The question was the verbal expression of a despairing hope. The voice, however, was steady.