CHAPTER XXIV
FOR A WOMAN
Seated before the cold stove in Peter Blunt’s hut, Jim Thorpe was lost in moody thought. His day had been long and wearying. He had risen before sun-up with little enough hope in his heart to cheer his day in the saddle, and now he was contemplating his blankets at night with even less.
Search, search. That had been his day. A fruitless search for the one man whom he now believed to be the only person who could lift the blight of suspicion from his overburdened shoulders.
Yes, where most Eve had sought to shield, she had most surely betrayed by her woman’s weakness and fear. For the truth had been forced upon Jim’s unsuspicious mind even against himself. Eve’s terror, during her long talk with him on his return from McLagan’s ranch, had done the very thing she had most sought to prevent. Her whole attitude had told him its own story of her anxiety for some one, and that some one could only have been her husband. And the rest had been brought about by the arguments of his own common sense.
At first her fear had only suggested the anxiety of a friend for himself, at the jeopardy in which public suspicion had placed him. Now he laughed at the conceit of the thought, although, at the time, it had seemed natural enough. Then the intensity of her fears had become so great, and the personal, selfish note in her attitude 266 so pronounced, that his suspicion was aroused, and he found himself groping for its meaning, its necessity.
Her terror seemed absurd. It could not be for him. It was out of all proportion. No, it was not for him. Was it for herself? He could see no reason. Then, why? For whom? And in a flash, as such realizations sometimes do come, even to the most unsuspicious, the whole thing leaped into his focus. If she had nothing to fear for herself, for whom did she fear? There was but one person––her husband.
If she feared for her husband, then she must suspect him. If she suspected, then there must be reason. But once this key was put into his hand, it needed little argument to make the whole thing plain. Point after point occurred to his mind carrying with each a conviction that was beyond the necessity of any argument that he could offer. He saw the whole thing with much the same instinctive conviction with which the wife had seen it.
Will had calculated his revenge on him carefully. He saw now what Eve had missed. The using of the “
