“Do you really think that, Buck?” she cried eagerly. “Do you? Do you?”
“Things seem changed, little gal,” he said, half ruefully. “Seems to me the past week’s been years an’ years long.” He laughed. “Maybe I got older. Maybe I think those things now, same as most folks think ’em—when they get older.”
But Joan was full of her own thought, and she went on eagerly, passing his reasons by.
“Listen, Buck, when Aunt Mercy told me all my troubles, she told me something else. But it seemed so small by the side of those other things, that I—that I almost forgot it. What was it? Her words? Yes, yes, I asked her, was there no hope for me? No means by which I could be saved from my fate? And she said that my only hope lay in finding a love that was stronger than death. These were her words——
“‘I loved your father with a passion nothing, no disaster could destroy. Go you, child, and find you such a love. Go you and find a love so strong that no disaster can kill it. And maybe life may still have some compensations for you, maybe it will lift the curse from your suffering shoulders. It—it is the only thing in the world that is stronger than disaster. It is the only thing in the world that is stronger than—death.’”
Her words dropped to a whisper as she finished speaking, and she waited, like a criminal awaiting sentence, for the man’s judgment on them. Her eyes were downcast, and her rounded bosom was stirring tumultuously. What would he say? What would he think? And yet she must have told him. Was he not the one person in the world who held her fate in his hands? Yes, he must know all there was in her mind. And she knew in her heart that he would understand as she wanted him to understand.
Buck suddenly reined Cæsar in, and brought him to a standstill, turning him about so that he looked back upon the world they were leaving behind them forever. In silence Joan responded to his movement, and her horse closed up against the other.
“Guess your auntie’s notions were all queer, so queer they’re mighty hard to understand,” he said reflectively. “But seems to me she’s hit a big truth some way. That curse is sure lifted—sure, sure.”
He pointed at the grim outline of Devil’s Hill, now fading in the distance.