“Don’t say a word, Eve, dear. Don’t you––now don’t 308 you,” she cried. “I’m going to do the talking. But first I’ll just shut the door.” She crossed to the door, speaking as she went. “You’ve just got to sit an’ listen, while I tell you all about it. An’ when we’ve finished, dear,” she said, coming back to her place beside her, “ther’s just one thing, an’ only one person we’ve got to think an’ speak about. It’s Jim Thorpe.”
Annie’s intuition must have been something approaching the abnormal, for she gave Eve no chance whatever to reply. She promptly sat down at the table, and, gazing straight into the stricken woman’s face, told her all that her husband had told her, and all that she had gleaned for herself, elsewhere. She linked everything together in such a manner as to carry absolute conviction, showing the jeopardy in which Jim stood.
Never once did she refer to Will, or hint again that she had discovered Eve’s secret, the secret which Doc Crombie and the whole of Barnriff would have given worlds to possess, but she told her story from the point of view of Jim’s peril as a suspected cattle-thief, and his apparent interest in her, Eve, which the whole of the village women were beginning so virtuously to resent.
“An’ if all that wasn’t sufficient to set a wretched lot o’ scallywags hanging him, along comes this business of the Little Bluff River,” she finished up.
Eve’s face was a study in emotion during the girl’s recital. From terror it passed to indignation, from horror to the shrinking of outraged wifehood. Now she stammered her request for Annie to go on.
“I––I don’t understand,” she declared, “what has that–––?”
“What’s it got to do with it?” cried Annie, with hot 309 anger at the thought. “Why, just this. It’s that mean Smallbones for sure. It’s him at the bottom of it. They’re saying that Jim did see the rustler, an’ helped him get clear away while he pretended to be chasin’ him. That’s what the mildest of ’em sez. But ther’s others swear, an’ Smallbones is one of ’em, that Jim himself was the rustler, an’ they rec’nized him from the start. But someways he jest managed to fool Doc, ’cause his horse was cool, and didn’t show no signs of the chase.”
The girl’s pretty eyes were wide with anger at these accusers. But her anger was nothing to compare with the fury which now stirred Eve.
“Oh, they’re wicked, cruel monsters! They hate him, and they only want to hang him because they hate him. It’s––it’s nothing to do with the cattle stealing. Smallbones has always hated Jim, because––because Jim’s better educated and comes from good people. Jim a cattle-thief? Jim wouldn’t steal a––a––blade of grass. He’s too noble, and good, and––and honest. Oh, I hate these people! I hate them all––all!”
Annie sat aghast at the storm she had roused. But her woman’s wit at once told her the nature of the real feeling underlying the girl’s words. She had suspected before, but now she understood what, perhaps, Eve herself had no definite understanding of. With the wrecking of her love for her husband it had been salved and safely anchored elsewhere. And Jim was the man who had––anchored it.